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Keith Baron appointed Chief Operating Officer at Perillo Tours

Keith Baron’s relocation to the east coast brings him back to his roots, having been raised in New Jersey and attending Rutgers University for his undergraduate studies.

WOODCLIFF LAKE, NJ – Steve Perillo , third generation owner of Perillo Tours , a leader in escorted travel to Italy for more than 75 years, announces the appointment of Keith Baron as chief operation officer (COO). Baron brings more than 35 years of travel industry experience to this leadership position, most recently serving as president of Abercrombie & Kent USA .

As COO, Baron will lead the day-to-day operations of the business, reporting directly to the president and owner, Steve Perillo. He will be responsible for driving the company’s strategic direction and growth.

“Keith has an impressive track record of hands-on leadership, improving operational efficiency, and driving growth,” Perillo stated. “Perillo Tours has built its legacy around delivering the best that Italy has to offer. As we head into the next phase of our story, Keith will play a critical role in strengthening our position as an Italy leader and growing our business beyond Italy. It’s an honor to welcome Keith into the Perillo family.”

Over the years, Baron has been accountable for the success of global travel brands and product lines and has gained international experience in more than 90 countries around the globe. “I am delighted to join the Perillo Tours family and look forward to partnering with Steve and the team on many exciting strategic endeavors to come,” said Baron.

Perillo added, “Keith’s depth of experience, along with his dedication to the travel advisor community, will play an important role in supporting Perillo’s ongoing success.”

Vicky Karantzavelou

Vicky  is the co-founder of TravelDailyNews Media Network where she is the  Editor-in Chief . She is also responsible for the daily operation and the financial policy. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Tourism Business Administration from the Technical University of Athens and a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Wales.

She has many years of both academic and industrial experience within the travel industry. She has written/edited numerous articles in various tourism magazines.

• Vicky Karantzavelou https://www.traveldailynews.com/author/vicky-karantzavelou/ Albatros Expeditions celebrates newest vessel, Ocean Albatros, in Christening ceremony
• Vicky Karantzavelou https://www.traveldailynews.com/author/vicky-karantzavelou/ Pegasus and TEV to provide university scholarships for 1,000 female students
• Vicky Karantzavelou https://www.traveldailynews.com/author/vicky-karantzavelou/ Occupancy for Hawai‘i’s hotels was 79.8 percent in February 2024
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The Scoop: What to Know About Perillo Tours

This italy specialist also offers tours to greece, spain, and hawaii..

The Scoop: What to Know About Trafalgar Tours

• Perillo Tours is a U.S.-based tour operator specializing in guided trips to Italy.
• Here’s everything you need to know—updated for 2024—about Perillo Tours to decide if it the tour company is a good fit for you.

Perillo Tours is an Italy-focused tour specialist for travelers coming from North America. Started in 1945 and operated by three generations of the same Italian-American family, Perillo has folks on the ground in both the U.S. and Italy. In more recent decades, the tour company has offers guided tours to Hawaii, Spain, and Greece in addition to its signature Italy tours.

TourScoop Takeaways

• Countries: Italy, Greece, Spain, and Hawaii
• Tour size: Up to 40 passengers
• Tour types: Group coach tours and private group coach tours

Credibility Check

On the USTOA (U.S. Tour Operators Association) and Travelstride site, Perillo gets 4.8 out of 5 . Perillo is not BBB accredited but earns an A+ rating from the organization.

Tour Destinations

Perillo is best known as an Italy specialist, with tours that range from nine to 15 days all across Italy. The company also offers a limited number of itineraries to Greece and Spain. And for 30 years, Perillo has also been hosting guided tours to Hawaii.

Perillo’s group Italy tours focus on either a geographical region or a theme. So for instance, you could opt for a tour that focuses exclusively on Rome and the Amalfi Coast, or Sicily and Italy’s South; or you could choose a themed tour like Renaissance and let the topic take you to cities (like Florence) that were important during the period. Some tours are more food-focused (for instance, Green Heart of Italy) but all Perillo tours are focused on good food experiences.

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Perillo’s Greece tour itineraries are more limited in number, but most offer a mix of land and sea excursions. The company currently offers just one Spain tour, a 13-day trip that covers much of the country. Perillo’s Hawaii tours focus on multi-island excursions that give travelers an easy way to experience the different islands of Hawaii on one itinerary. Hawaii tours range from about nine to 13 days.

Tour Guides

Perillo uses both tour directors and local guides, and both must pass a rigorous series of written and oral exams before becoming Perillo tour guides. According to Perillo: “This is a very difficult process, with approximately only one in 10 applicants passing the examinations.” And All Perillo guides are trained in the “Perillo style of ‘over-the-top’ guest service.”

Excursions/Extras

Perillo tour prices include hotels, sightseeing with expert guides, transfers, baggage handling, daily breakfast, select scheduled meals, tips, taxes, and complimentary WiFi on all Perillo coach buses. While Perillo does offer competitive airfare, it’s not included in the base price of the tour.

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There are often additional optional activities offered at (a fair and modest) extra cost during tour free time. Examples of such extras include a gondola serenade in Venice, the Illuminated Rome at Night experience, a Lake Como boat cruise, and a visit to Villa D’Este in Tivoli.

Typical Travelers

The majority of Perillo Tours’ guests fall in the 59-77 age range, and most are from the United States. Perillo Tours are popular with couples, but about 13% of tour travelers are solo travelers.

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Communication

Perillo communications come via via phone, email and website. Payment reminders and alerts are emailed. Final documents are mailed along with baggage tags, instructions with a travel wallet, and a travel pouch.

Loyalty Program

Perillo offers a discount, a special gift, and best available rooms for repeat travelers.

Private Options

Perillo Tours, offers private escorted tours for groups with a minimum of 12 and a maximum of 20 people. These tours are popular with multigenerational and extended families, and groups of close friends. Eight of Perillo’s signature itineraries are available as private tours, and all feature hand-selected, immersive experiences like olive oil and wine tasting in Tuscany, private boat rides around Capri, and parmigiano cheese sampling in Parma. 

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ItalyTravel.com is brought to you by Perillo Tours , America’s leader in travel to Italy since 1945, and its sister company ItalyVacations.com Check back weekly for new Italy travel tips and ideas for making your Italian vacation the trip of a lifetime! Our expert contributors will bring you the best of Italy and the best ideas for exploring the land of la dolce vita !

Contributors:

Steve Perillo —  Steve is the 3 rd generation owner of Perillo Tours and ItalyVacations.com . He is an expert on travel to Italy,  a musician, and a major dog lover.

Kathy McCabe — Kathy is the founder of the award-winning subscription travel newsletter, Dream of Italy , and a noted Italy travel expert . Kathy’s travel advice has been quoted in USA TODAY, BusinessWeek, U.S. News + World Report and on ABC News, among others. Her favorite Italy travel experiences include hunting for truffles in Umbria and Piedmont (with her second favorite thing in the world – dogs), touring the Vatican and Rome’s ancient Rome with the Official Guide of Rome and traveling on the Orient-Express between Venice and Rome. She recently released a Rome travel app for iPhone/iPad and a Rome travel app for Android.

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Perillo Is Touring Italy with Former SNL Cast Member, Actor Joe Piscopo

Photo:  Anthony Correia / Shutterstock.com

For one tour in 2023, travelers visiting Italy with Perillo Tours can mingle with comedian and radio host Joe Piscopo. Piscopo will join Steve Perillo, president and third-generation owner of Perillo Tours, for the exclusive 11-day Rome and Sicily tour from October 18 to 28, 2023.

"Traveling in Italy with Joe Piscopo is a sheer delight," said Perillo. "Joe brings such genuine enthusiasm and energy for the experiences along the tour, it's like his first trip back to the 'old country.' Our guests love seeing Italy alongside Joe. Even someone like me who's been hundreds of times has a blast seeing both the familiar and new sites through his eyes."

"Joe's one-of-a-kind cabaret show in Rome exclusively for Perillo Tours guests is a highlight," Perillo added. "Between his amazing Sinatra impression and singing voice and his comedy routines, there isn't a dry eye from tears of laughter and pure joy."

Piscopo is best known for his comedy, including his stint as a cast member of Saturday Night Live from 1980 to 1984.

The 11-day tour includes four nights in Rome capped with a private dinner show performance by Piscopo. The group then moves on to three nights in Taormina, Sicily – backdrop for the second season of "White Lotus" – followed by two nights in Palermo.

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Where family wealth meets wisdom

Jan. 18, 2024: Inside the Perillo Tours family business

Steve Perillo, president and owner of Perillo Tours , is currently at the helm of a third-generation family business that was launched in 1945. Perillo has successfully built upon the legacy that his father and grandfather established and continues to take his business to new heights by leveraging the rising generation. Here Perillo shares the family’s journey and gives an insider’s view into how the family business operates today.

Can you share the story of the Perillo family that led to the launch of the business that we know today?

During the “great arrival” between 1880 and 1920, 25 million foreigners arrived on American shores, including 4 million Italians. Joseph Perillo arrived in New York in 1924 with a law degree from Naples University. He got a bank job in Brooklyn and sent for his wife and child two years later. Given his education, in 1945 he opened a travel/insurance/real estate/legal affairs office near Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.

Three of Joseph’s four sons became lawyers and initially worked at Joseph Perillo & Sons. However, Mario and Robert [Bob] eventually inherited the business and ran the company as partners until 1978. They were pioneers in the travel industry, introducing the first charter flights and all-inclusive tours to Italy as early as 1969. Their successful collaboration lasted for 30 years. After their partnership, Bob established his own wholesale travel business in Manhattan, while Mario relocated to Pearl River and rebranded the company.

European group tours are a natural choice for an older generation, who are no longer willing to hoist their heavy luggage onto the wrong train car.  As the World War II generation receded in the 2000s, everyone wondered if their more sophisticated baby boomer kids would also “age into group bus tours” — and they did.

This age group wants to be chauffeured to preplanned experiences and beautiful accommodations. But to travel like this privately costs over $1,000 a day per person. A Perillo group tour costs under $500 a day per person.

Family businesses constantly have to balance maintaining the character of the business while expanding into new markets. How do you navigate this?

When a business stumbles onto a hit product, the first idea is to keep selling that same exact product but to a lot more people, because if 1,000 people like it, why shouldn’t 10,000 or 100,000 people like it, too?

The challenge is that marketing your standout product to a wider audience costs a lot of money. Instead, it may be cheaper to sell a new product to your original 1,000 buyers. After all, they’re already satisfied customers, and it costs almost nothing to market to them.

But alas, hit products are rare, and odds are that your new product will not be the same hit as the original. The lesson here, as always, is the middle way. You need to always increase exposure to your main product while always testing new products in search of your next hit.

So, we can sell one trip to 20,000 people or two trips to 10,000 people or four trips to 5,000. “To diversify or not” is one of the most common topics in the Harvard Business Review for this very reason.

Today, Perillo Tours fights to keep its Italy travel dominance while testing new destinations all the time — like Hawaii, Spain and Greece. Some destinations work better than others, and all this “destination testing” gives new experiences to Perillo alumni who were impressed with Italy.

How is the family business currently structured?

For estate planning and for liability protection, Perillo Tours is held in a trust. I currently head the company as CEO with a new COO hire, Keith Baron. My nephew Devin Buonanno [who is 29] is looking forward to representing the fourth generation running the company.

How does your family approach succession planning?

Someone almost convinced me that monarchies are the best form of government because they can last for over 1,000 years. Meanwhile, America is the oldest democracy at only 250 years. A trust is like that monarchy. Employees and family members come and go. Disputes can rage. But the trust is always above it all, calmly protecting against customer lawsuits, conniving family members or mutiny in the ranks. 

When you look to the next gen rising, how do you see the family’s legacy continuing?

My nephew Devin Buonanno is looking forward to continuing the Perillo legacy.  Apprentice tour operators are usually given a single destination to control. Devin runs Perillo’s Hawaii tours, which since the 1990s has been the company’s second-largest destination.  Being on-site to meet and work with the guests directly is probably the single most important experience to have. After all, the customers really run the business and vote with their dollars.

In terms of your core focus on Italy, can you tell us the future of travel there, given the incredible demand to travel to the region?

America’s love affair with Italy is only surpassed by the Italians’ love for Americans. When you have that warm feeling underlying the fantastic climate, art, food, wine, music, fashion and history, it supercharges the destination.

Meanwhile, the crowds have become the one major challenge for this perfect tourist destination. Tour companies prebuy tickets, so there are few to no lines. But others can wait three hours to enter St. Peter’s in Rome — a church you would have simply strolled into 20 years ago.

Two solutions available right now are to visit Italy in the off-peak winter months or to visit the 100 other medieval villages with the same great food, art and people minus the crowds. The good news is travelers are now more actively seeking hidden gems and off-the-beaten-path locations in Italy, like Matera and Tropea.

Visiting Matera in southern Italy, you’ll feel like you stepped into the actual Nativity scene. Known as the second Bethlehem, it’s no wonder Mel Gibson chose to film “Passion of the Christ” in Matera. And with its cave dwellings called “Sassi,” this historic city is like none other in the world.

Tropea lies along la Costa degli Dei [Coast of the Gods] in Calabria. Voted one of Italy’s most beautiful villages, this is a popular destination among Italians and Europeans that is surprisingly unknown to Americans. It’s set atop stunning cliffs, overlooking sandy beaches with clear, turquoise water. Tropea is just as gorgeous as the Amalfi Coast, but a lot cheaper.

Beyond the culture wars: The real value of ESG

By SAMUEL ADAMS

If you read anything about ESG in 2023, you probably were reading about a political debate. From the volume of articles on the debate, it might seem as if the movement to sustainable investing is a political one. This is false.

There is nothing inherently political in nature about ESG. When defined correctly, it is just a term to describe data on companies that might not be included in their standard financial reporting. But the term ESG is rarely used correctly anymore. It has been caught up in the culture wars and used on both sides of the political spectrum to stoke animus.

ESG as the bogeyman

Much of the blame for these anti-ESG attacks belongs to our hyperpartisan political system. Some politicians in the U.S. are fueling the culture wars by calling out ESG as the bogeyman. Agitators on the right claim that ESG is an attempt to force companies to adopt the far left’s progressive, liberal and "woke" agenda. And they claim that, if left unchecked, ESG will limit corporate profits and leave America without enough energy resources. And from the left we hear that ESG is just a dangerous distraction, akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. These pundits seem to believe the profit motive will always lead to bad outcomes, so stronger regulation is needed to curb capitalism’s destructive ways.

It is easy to criticize ESG. It is a relatively new investment discipline — the term was only coined in 2005. It is neither the distraction nor the bogeyman that it has been made out to be.

But the investment management industry is at fault as well. As interest in sustainable investing has grown, fund managers have too often chosen terminology for marketing reasons rather than for accuracy. This lack of discipline in the use of terms for sustainable investing has created confusion about what ESG actually is and what it isn’t.

The difference between ESG and SRI

There are forms of values-based investing where you can push a political agenda, but that isn't ESG or environmental, social and governance. That is SRI or socially responsible investing. SRI investors have historically divested from companies they don’t like and invested in those they do. Some SRI investors shun guns, others embrace them. Some SRI funds avoid so-called "sin stocks" like alcohol and tobacco, but other funds are explicitly investing in these firms. SRI is customized to whatever the investor wants, so it can be conservative or progressive or religious or deeply personal.

Unfortunately, ESG has become a catchall term for all forms of values-based investing. This lazy and inaccurate definition creates confusion for investors and leaves an opening for attacks from all sides.

A more accurate description of ESG would help both investors and politicians understand it better. ESG is an investment process that examines the risks to companies arising from their environmental footprints, their social impacts and their governance practices. ESG data can illuminate which firms pollute more, which have labor issues and which have inadequate risk controls. This is why more of the largest investors around the world are embracing ESG:·   

• 12 of the 15 largest pension funds in the world employ ESG.
• 75% of sovereign wealth funds use ESG.
• 47% of central banks integrate ESG.

It is difficult to see how these large institutional investors could be investing with a political agenda. After all, they are investing on behalf of millions of investors who have a myriad of different values. They are not excluding coal companies or reducing their portfolio’s carbon footprint to be politically correct. They are doing it to reduce risk.

Focusing on materiality

These investors are hungry for any additional information that helps them better assess risk. More data and more transparency help markets digest and price risk more accurately. You need not be a sustainable investor to want this information — even conventional investors want a fuller risk picture.

Recognizing this, the Securities and Exchange Commission will soon publish guidance on new climate-risk disclosure requirements for public companies. The proposed rules are expected to require companies to report their greenhouse-gas emissions and exposure to climate risk. Climate-change risk is real and therefore a concern for all investors, whether sustainably minded or not.

ESG is a term that should remain focused on material issues. The issues that are material can alter the financial status of the company in the near term or are of such pressing concern to the community that they could affect the finances of that company longer term. If an issue is more about politics than profits — like abortion and gender pronouns — it is an SRI issue and not often material. Individuals can choose to invest with ESG and/or SRI in mind. It is their personal money. Public funds, on the other hand, like government pension plans and city treasury departments, should potentially consider ESG and stay away from SRI.

The political rhetoric is overheated enough. It doesn’t need more fuel to burn, and we would be wise to keep investment strategies out of the fire. We certainly don’t want politicians deciding how we should invest.

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