About the Owner
Food and Wine Travel is the newest and most exciting business in travel.
The owner of the business, Karen Ridge, however is not new to the travel industry, nor to business ownership.
Karen Ridge owned her first travel agency, Jetset Mildura between 1993 and 2003, beginning in the industry when she was just 21 years old.
That business turned into one of regional Australia’s travel agency success stories. During her time at Jetset Mildura Karen was awarded numerous national and industry awards for sales, marketing innovation and business success, as well as being twice nominated for the Telstra Business Women’s Awards. She was a finalist for the award in 2001 at the age of 29.
After selling the agency, Karen moved to the Gold Coast where she sought to capitalize on her marketing strengths by setting up consulting firm Dynamic Marketing & Events Pty Ltd, and then Dynamic Networking. She quickly established herself a niche of small business clients, working for three years in this field.
Her business grew to include five other consultants, all of whom were trained on her custom-created sales and marketing system.
As the business grew, Karen saw the potential for her clients to do business together, so she introduced her then famed event ‘Drinkies on the Balcony’ to draw people together socially and enable them to network.
This formally underlined the start of a food and wine affair that had long been established in her personal life but not brought to bear in business. Each event involved a gourmet chef on site, a butler and selected wines - and the infatuation with the finer things in life has only intensified since!
Karen returned to Melbourne late 2006 to re-enter the travel industry and explore possible opportunities in the industry, but it wasn’t until mid 2008 when she saw the food-wine-travel opportunity, and immediately created Food and Wine Travel.
