Meet Heirloom Journeys: Accessible Travel Specialists on a Mission

Like many in the industry, agency owners Angela and Lee Alessi shared a lifelong passion for travel before taking the steps to become advisors. Yet, for this Louisiana-based husband-and-wife team, launching Heirloom Journeys represents something deeper than travel planning.

Heirloom Journeys is a travel agency that specializes in personalized and accessible travel. Since founding the agency in 2024, Angela and Lee have operated their business based on a simple philosophy: that travel should be about creating lasting memories and shouldn’t have an expiration date.

“Every trip you take, even for solo travelers, you’re building your own core memories,” Angela told Travel Market Report. “So many people are starting to realize, ‘I may never get to later’ … Our purpose [as travel advisors] is giving people that permission to enjoy what they’ve worked for and make those memories with their family because that is all you have left when somebody’s gone.”

Not everyone has equal opportunity, or ability, to travel. Part of Heirloom Journeys’ personalized approach includes championing accessibility within the industry. As someone who uses mobility devices, Lee understands the challenges of navigating foreign spaces or systems that don’t follow the ADA standards that apply to U.S. hotels, restaurants, and public transit systems. He also understands the emotional side of it — that social pressure that a vacation is supposed to look a certain way, and the fear that one’s disability will disrupt travel for the group.

Ultimately, Lee urges his clients to shift their thinking away from that idealized vacation toward more pragmatic expectations, arguing that it’s better to travel with limitations on activities than to never experience the destination at all.

“Sometimes, you just have to look for the positive points. And that’s part of that memory too,” Lee said.

Heirloom Journeys: A Lesson In Carpe Diem

Angela and Lee’s agency philosophy is rooted in their shared experience with transformative grief. In a strange — perhaps fateful — coincidence, both of them spoke with their fathers shortly before their deaths about the importance of travel and living life to the fullest. Although these conversations happened independently, and more than a decade apart, both would change the course of Angela and Lee’s lives.

Back in 2006, Lee’s father was hospitalized due to his declining health. During one routine visit, his father expressed regret that he had never taken to Lee to Sicily, their ancestral home, together. He lamented that he waited too long to enjoy the fruit of his labors, and stressed that his son should not make the same mistake.

The next day, his father was gone.

“When he died, I was like, ‘man, I got to revamp my life and start living it because your health isn’t always going to be there,'” Lee explained.

Years later, Lee met Angela, and the two would often travel together — mainly to domestic destinations, like a short beach retreat in Florida. A few years into that relationship, tragedy struck again, with Angela losing her father in 2019. The two were very close; Angela even worked at his industrial construction company for 15 years. When she last spoke to him, he told her his only regret was that he waited too long to retire and enjoy his golden years with her mother.

“He looked at me, and he said, ‘Don’t make the same mistake I did. Promise me, you’re going to live your life now. Take those trips now. Don’t put it off because there’s no guarantee that tomorrow’s going to come. So I promised him that,” Angela recalled.

Months later, when Angela confided in Lee about that final conversation, she was surprised to learn he had had a similar conversation with his own father a decade prior.

“It really flipped the script on us of why [travel] was important,” Angela said.

The two started traveling the world together after that, and caught the attention of friends and family who would ask for help planning their trips. When that snowballed, Angela realized how much she enjoyed the work, and decided to turn her travel hobby into a travel business. They named their agency Heirloom Journeys as a nod to the lesson they learned from their late fathers: that creating core memories with loved ones is the most meaningful inheritance one can pass on.

Accessible Travel as a Growing Niche

Lee is a veteran of the Marine Corps, and in recent years, his health has been affected by an injury he sustained while serving. Today, he walks with a cane and leg braces, and has difficulty navigating stairs and uneven ground. As his disability progresses, he’s had to adapt how he travels. Some days, that means recognizing his limitations and opting out of a planned experience rather than risk causing further injury or discomfort.

“In 2017, I had a Marine Corps injury catch up to me, so I’ve started losing the use of my legs. I use a cane now. I wear AFOs on both feet. So it’s been super important for us as a couple to travel and to do it while I can,” explained Lee.

When talking to his clients, Lee encourages them to look at where they are now, while discouraging them from being caught up in what they used to be physically capable of, or how they used to imagine their ideal vacation. He believes that there is still value in seeing other parts of the world and making memories, even if one isn’t comfortable participating in more active experiences, like a zodiac ride in Antarctica or climbing the “stairs of death” in Peru.

Angela and Lee also make sure to ask targeted qualifying questions, identifying accessibility concerns clients may not have thought of, like whether or not they can handle heavy luggage at the airport, and if they need to book a hotel room on the first floor. As Lee explained to TMR, too often the industry treats mobility accessibility as a binary between non-disabled persons and those who use a wheelchair — but the reality is, many exist in the space between, like he does.

Lee also likes to ask clients what a “bad day looks like,” which can help him and Angela create an itinerary with the flexibility to accommodate sometimes unpredictable disability-related disruptions.

Angela and Lee didn’t set out to create an accessible travel agency; in fact, the Heirloom Journeys website places much more emphasis on their bespoke approach than their experience navigating accessibility (although the latter is mentioned on the “specialties” page).

Yet, Angela and Lee told TMR that accessible travel planning is a growing segment of their overall business.

“I would love to grow that accessible travel section more, and not from a sales standpoint, because I really think it’s so underserved,” said Angela. “And if that becomes our sole focus, I would be perfectly fine with that because it is such an underserved population.”