NORTHAMPTON – Pioneer Valley Travel (PVT) is a family-owned business located at 88 King St. in Northampton. For 56 years the travel agency has maintained a strong presence in Western Mass. While the organization provides travel services all over the world, COVID-19 has posed a unique set of challenges.

“We are a brick-and-mortar agency. We’re community-minded and support the community,” said President and Owner Martha Borawski. “We provide retail travel services all over the world for leisure and corporate travel. Mainly leisure travel because corporate travel really has changed its model, especially with this pandemic. Because we’re in a college area with the five colleges here and the prep schools, that’s what we consider our corporate clientele doing the faculty and administration.”

Borawski's parents, Alexander and Mary Borawski, started Pioneer Valley Travel in 1965. She began working at the business 52 years ago when she got out of college. Borawski told Reminder Publishing when her parents first started the business, they had a passion for traveling and this was their way of being able to travel. In those days, it there was a need for a travel agency in town. There was only one other travel agency at the time ,which was a friendly competition Borawski said.

At Pioneer Valley Travel, Borawski plans a range of trips, from trips for golfers, barge and small river boat trips to African safaris. She was awarded the Springfield Technical Community College Western Massachusetts Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame Achievement Award for Hampshire County and is one of the top 100 Woman owned businesses in Massachusetts.

“Before COVID, PVT was running very successfully. We recreated ourselves several times with the change of times,” Borawski responded. “We had deregulation in 1976 of the airlines, the PATCO strike, 9/11 and the financial crisis in 2007 to 2008. We’ve had lots of different things happen in our industry over the last 56 years.”

She went on to say, “It’s been hard going through those times, but we’ve been able to get through them and up until February of 2020 we were at our peak. We have a very large network of referrals so we have clients all over the country. We have a large group of people from Rhode Island, from the Boston area, the Florida area, the west coast to New York City.”

On St. Patrick’s Day 2020, Pioneer Valley Travel closed down, and opened up part-time on Memorial Day. Now, the agency is physically open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day, but work remotely until 5 p.m.  Monday through Friday. When the pandemic started, Borawski said for months they were handling cancellations and postponements.

In October of 2020, Pioneer Valley Travel partnered with Burati Travel Inc in East Longmeadow and Cruise and Travel Company in Turner Falls. The agency is also working with the Woodstock Inn, Wequassett Resort and Golf Club in Harwich and the White Elephant Hotels on Nantucket Island on getting special rates for fall getaways.     “More drug companies are making more vaccines. I think the faster that happens, the faster travel will pick up,” replied Borawski.  “People that have always traveled, there’s a pent-up desire for them to travel. We’re seeing more of the fall of 2021 to the late summer of 2021 and definitely into 2022. If the vaccine comes out sooner, you’ll see more people traveling in the summer especially families.”

For more information, log on to www.pvt-inc.com. Community members can call at 586-1366, their toll-free number 800-245-0153 or email at info@pvt-inc.com.