About Us

Bell & Bly Travel Design is a boutique travel advisory for entrepreneurs, executives, families, and couples. We have tens of thousands of hours of travel and planning experience and add value to your trips by finding experiences you didn’t even know exist.

Meet Our Team

Sarah Groen

Owner, Lead Travel Advisor

My mom likes to tell the story of the autobiography I wrote in 1st grade – I had never set foot outside Corpus Christi, Texas yet I wrote that “I love traveling and speaking Spanish!” My travel experience has since ranged from ultra-luxury safaris to nomadic home-stays, language immersion programs to luxury-chartered sailing vacations, and highly detailed itineraries to on the fly backpacking excursions. In all, I’ve been to all 7 continents, nearly 100 countries, and have tens of thousands of hours of travel and planning experience.

I founded Bell & Bly Travel to fill a simple gap in the market. My friends and I were lacking a true advisor to help effectively plan our travels. We paid wealth managers, lawyers, and personal trainers – but didn’t have an expert at our side to plan the fun stuff.

I love working with clients to design trips of a lifetime and long-term strategies for achieving their bucket lists. My personal travel philosophy is to “travel bigger” and I will encourage you to push the limits of your comfort zone (recognizing that everyone’s limit is different), but then I will organize the trip in a way that allows you to feel completely taken care of. This collaborative process results in magical trips, personal growth, and vivid lifetime memories.

In addition to my passion for travel, I am an experienced executive and entrepreneur. I have held positions in investment banking, private equity, venture investing, and at Uber. I have an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BBA in Finance from The University of Texas

Maria Vieyra

Travel Designer

Maria Vieyra is Bell & Bly’s Lead Travel Designer. Maria comes to us from Kerzner (One & Only hotels) and Qatar Airways – she worked in Marketing and Communication roles for several years before joining the Luxury Travel Industry.

She is from Argentina but has been living abroad for almost 9 years – in Qatar, Dubai, and now in Bahrain. She left her home country when she was 21yo together with her boyfriend (now husband) to pursue her passion for travel and she has traveled tirelessly ever since. After moving to Bahrain due to her husbands’ job, Maria decided it was the time to start working remotely so she could travel even more – that’s when she serendipitously met Sarah and joined the Bell & Bly Dream Team. She has been in the team for almost 3 years now, and has grown in her role to become our Lead Travel Designer.

Maria thinks the traveller spirit runs in her family since before she was born – when her maternal grand-grand parents migrated from Europe to Argentina looking for a better future. This spirit was later on developed by his father who would make his kids take turns to travel with him (beacuse they are 11 siblings!), and his oldest brother who will return home from business trips from all around the world with a local present for each of them. She’d sit in the living room waiting for him to open his luggage and reveal the presents, that’s when she started to travel viracoulsy through his travels. His brother was also whom took Maria on her first international trip when she was 10yo – he took all the youngest siblings on a beach trip to Brazil for NYE and that’s when she boarded her very first flight – little she knew it’d be the first one of hundreds! (fun fact – she has a video of her little-self taking off for the very first time)

Maria translates her passion for travel into each trip she plans for our clients – she loves designing bespoke itineraries; helping families, couples, and solo travelers create everlasting memories; and seeing the world through their lenses.

Jazmín Dalinkevicius

Travel Coordinator

Jazmín was born in Argentina, into a family of travelers where everyone lived or worked abroad. That led her to understand that “home is where your heart is”, and that roots are not something static. At only 6 months old she made her first international trip and since then, she has not stopped. Her family has the motto “traveling is never an expense, it is an investment”, and based on that, Jazmin built a passion and a professional career.

Although she began traveling with her family, at the age of 16 she made her first solo trip to study and live in England for 2 months. She studied Communication Sciences in Buenos Aires and when she was 21 she moved to Qatar, where she worked at Qatar Airways for 6 years in the area of Aeropolitical Affairs, a position that allowed her to combine her professional background with her wanderlust.

She believes each trip is an opportunity to meet new cultures, flavors, people and experiences. Being part of the Bell & Bly team is the opportunity to share with clients and co-workers her love for dreaming, planning, and designing the perfect trip.

Allen Mercado

Travel Coordinator

Born and raised in the Philippines, Allen is now based in Peru, where she has been working in tourism for the last 6 years. Her experience in the industry together with her background in Business and Customer Experience are great foundations to tackling projects at Bell & Bly Travel Design. Having close connections with the US, she has traveled to 15 states and counting. She has traveled across Asia, with Thailand and Malaysia carrying unique memories. Her next adventures will be throughout Europe.

When Allen is not working, she spends time surfing and discovering the food scene, a perfect combo living in Peru, a country renowned for its gastronomy and endless waves. Her favorite memory is when she took an impromptu surf trip to Guanacaste,Costa Rica going off-the-beaten-path, driving through the various landscapes and traveling through the eyes of a local to experience the definition of pura vida.

Ariadne Batista

Client Relations

Born and raised in Panama, Ariadne was exposed to travel since she was six years old when her mom decided to send her by herself to visit a relative in Germany. This was the beginning of her passion for traveling. That passion grew more in high school when she was able to spend three months in France living with a host family and learning the Solo travel experience at 16 years old. Years later, she graduated from Tourism Management & Hospitality and did an internship in Italy where she enjoyed meeting new people, tasting local culture, and getting to experience different places around Europe. As she says: “The good thing about traveling is that we always end up learning a thing or two about ourselves along the way!”

In her free time, she enjoys cooking for her loved ones, including her dog, listening to music and watching shows from different countries. She worked for ten years in a DMC designing Panamanian travel experiences before joining the team.

Core Values

Bell & Bly Travel is known for a focus on surprising and delighting clients, unequivocal travel experience, and for crafting amazing adventures.

Love Our Customers

We always do what is best for our clients and put herculean effort into surprising and delighting them along the way. We treat my clients like family and they do the same for us.

Always Be Learning

We are constantly traveling and learning all there is to know about new destinations. We spend time up front learning about our clients’ unique travel style and bucket list dreams. We help clients have amazing experiences on the ground that expand their knowledge of the world.

Cultivate Adventure

We help clients gently push the boundaries of their comfort zones and use our deep industry relationships to craft amazing adventures and experiences that cannot be found online.

Behind The Name

When deciding what to name the company, we wanted something that invoked a spirit of adventure and was a nod to inspirational travelers. Bell & Bly is named after two travelers and world experts, who were well ahead of their time – Gertrude Bell and Nellie Bly.

Gertrude Bell was an English writer, traveler, and archaeologist at the turn of the 20th century. She traveled alone through the Arabian Desert and became the world’s foremost expert on the Bedouin tribes.

Nellie Bly also lived at the turn of the century and was an American journalist. Inspired by the work of fiction, Around The World in Eighty Days, she decided to make a go at it and traveled around the world in 72 days while documenting it for the popular press.

Praise

“We could not be happier to have planned our trip with Sarah. She thought of activities and off the beaten track destinations we would never have considered. The entire process was such a pleasure, I would recommend her to anyone!”

PAM S.

“Sarah planned a holiday trip for us to Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Every detail was taken into account!”

KENNY L.

“Sarah helped my family to plan a surprise birthday trip for my father. It was all so well thought out, it couldn’t have gone better.”

ADAM L.

“I was a little nervous to visit India, but it has always been on my bucketlist. I worked with Sarah to plan a trip that was two parts luxury, one part adventure. I went hiking in Ladakh and did homestays in small villages, and also was treated like a VIP on my visit to the Taj Mahal.”

ASHLEY M.

“I run a startup and I have zero time to dedicate to planning a trip. The information out there is so overwhelming! I worked with Sarah to plan my honeymoon and it was one of the most amazing experiences. She took all the trouble out of planning and made the trip so enjoyable for my husband and me.”