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Welcome to Cairns Holiday Specialists
Cairns Holiday Specialists have been recognised as the Great Barrier Reef destination specialists since 2005 in designing bespoke travel itineraries and luxury holidays to Cairns and the World Heritage Great Barrier Reef.
Our speciality is working with overseas travel agents from countries all over the world and looking after their clients travel needs across Queensland and the rest of Australia.
Our team have experienced and explored all of the local tours and attractions and inspected each individual hotel, resort and accommodation house to ensure they can deliver the right advice to satisfy your specific travel requirements.
The Cairns Holiday Specialists teams attention to detail and high level of personalised service has led to a growing list of repeat visitors who return to us year after year.
Our professional travel team will personally tailor your Cairns and Great Barrier Reef tours based around the most iconic reefs, the best boats and the types of experiences that suit you and your fellow travellers individual needs.
Your are our guest, not a tourist!
If you are looking for something special we also manage the largest fleet of private charter boats and superyachts for day charters and overnight extended charters on the Great Barrier Reef.
We also organise private charter tours to the Daintree Rainforest and private helicopter flights to remote sand cays, and outback Queensland.
Cairns Holiday Specialists also specialises in group travel looking after all of the ground arrangements from the moment the guests arrive at the Cairns International Airport.
Our company takes great pride in being the leader in its field of local expertise and uses the most modern and up to date technology to ensure we offer the best rates and service levels to ensure we remain as the market leaders for travel planning into Cairns Queensland Australia.
We invite you to browse our on line catalogue and come and see how we can tailor make your holiday plans to suit your budget and travel expectations.
Christina James
Managing Director
Meet our Fabulous Team of Cairns Holiday Specialists
Jennifer Tofia Tour Consultant
Born in Cairns, I grew up at the Northern Beaches at Trinity Beach, and was raised in a family who enjoyed the outdoor lifestyle. We spent many great times at the local beaches, islands, camping at Cape Tribulation, Mission Beach, Dunk Island, and other various spots around the Tropical North Queensland region.
Growing up in Cairns, I can even boast of my fond memories being a 6year old travelling up to Kuranda on the scenic railway and riding in the now famous amphibious Army Duck within its first year of operation. This was many years ago, but it is nice to tote that I was one of the first to experience the Army Duck ride back then! I have since experienced the tour as an adult.
In my early twenties, I left for Brisbane, and then Sydney. Yearly visits back home to catch up with family and friends in Cairns left me with limited time to visit the local attractions that lure people to the Tropical North. However, when I met my husband to be, I wanted to show him where I grew up, all the spectacular scenery, the beaches, the swimming holes in the rainforests, and of course, the Great Barrier Reef. In time we ended up relocating to Cairns. We had a taste of paradise and couldn’t keep away!
I am enjoying being back in this beautiful part of the world, and there are plenty of great reasons why! I love to show off what we have up here, for this reason I know that I am in a job perfect for me. I am in a role where I can assist our guests plan their perfect holidays. Not only on a professional, level but a personal level as well.
Finding tours and attractions that suit our guest’s specific needs and budgets is important to us. We like to get to know our guests and their travelling companions. They entrust us to plan their tours and advise of site seeing attractions, and no one knows our back yard better than us!
My favourite places to visit on my days off, are the Babinda Boulders, Josephine Falls, Behana Gorge south of Cairns, Milla Milla Falls, Lake Eacham on the Atherton Tablelands, and most of all…anywhere out on the Great Barrier Reef. It is another world out there under the surface!
Annie Fishburn Accounts Manager
Annie grew up in Sydney and made the smart move to sunny Cairns in 1995.
Between 1995 and 2008 Annie was the General Manager for a Cairns based horse riding tourism company and Regional Manager for a major tourist transport company operating in the Cairns and Port Douglas region.
Annie joined The Tour Specialists and The Cairns Holiday Specialists team in early 2009. For fun she runs a dog training school after hours helping owners control their rambunctious pets or sometimes the other way around stopping the pets from controlling their rambunctious owners.
Annie lives on acreage and has a menagerie of barnyard friends along with 3 dogs, 2 horses, kangaroos, wallabies and other Australian wildlife to keep her really busy.
Oh and thankfully she is really good at maths and business management!
Belinda Mathews Reservations Supervisor
I was born in Bridport Tasmania and migrated to Cairns over 20 years ago with family to escape the cold for the balmy lifestyle of Tropical North Queensland.
My first position in tourism was in 2005 at the Angsana Resort & Spa Palm Cove where I was initially based in hotel reception and then progressed into Reservation Sales shortly after. As I had been at the resort for 5 years it was time to move on and progress in my career and along came the opportunity to join the team at Cairns Holiday Specialists. Lucky for me this company was also based in beautiful Palm Cove!
I have been with The Cairns Holiday Specialists for 6 years now and still loving it! I enjoy helping our guests find the perfect accommodation and tours for their dream holiday and then meeting them once they arrive. It's a real sense of achievement when you can meet your clients face to face when they take the time to come and seek you out and personally thank you for planning their holiday.
It's also great hearing about how beautiful our backyard is and how amazing our tours and attractions are, because as locals we often take for granted what we see and experience every single day.
Thank you to all of our guests for giving us the nudge and reminding us of how lucky we really are to actually live here full time!
Sophie Tabouel
Originally born in France, I migrated to Australia in 1996 to the big smoke of Sydney. Cairns, and more precisely Palm Cove, was my favourite holiday destination for years and I loved it so much so we decided to move here permanently.
We arrived in beautiful Tropical North Queensland in 2004. I had the pleasure of working in hospitality in a five star Palm Cove resort for 4 years before joining the 'Cairns Holiday Specialists' team in 2012.
What I like the most about the Cairns region is the diversity of nature, from the reef to the rainforest including the outback, we have it all. The Cairns region is big enough and has everything you need but has also kept that friendly atmosphere smaller places have.
Personal Interests: reading in French and English, my friends, dogs oh and I do not mind a good Aussie wine or two with good company.
Christina James Managing Director
I have been lucky enough to have worked in the tourism and hospitality industry in sales and marketing for over 22 years all across Australia promoting this great country to not only Australians but also visitors from around the world. When I attend travel shows and expos I get to meet potential guests before they actually make the decision to come to Cairns and Tropical North Queensland for a holiday which assists us to put experiences together that suit their needs and ultimately attracts them to come and book a holiday with us.
The customer survey forms we receive from our guests after they travel are real testimonials to the attention to detail and effort that our team put into ensuring they plan the most memorable holiday for our guests. Our company philosophy is "It's not just a holiday it's a lifetime experience"!
Personally I am a real greenie and at one stage in my very early life I spent some time living in the Daintree and Cape Tribulation Rainforests in a humpie learning about our fragile eco system, the endangered rainforest and the endangered wild life that it supports on a symbiotic relationship.
To this day I am still a wildlife warrior and protector of rainforests and I try and shop for organic products that do not harm our planet.
I try to stay fit and healthy by going to the gym and joining the odd hike up along the local mountains and gorges but it is very hard to do so as the tourism industry here in Cairns is very social and lot's of our guests and family and friends are always coming for a visit and to share a meal in some our favourite local restaurants.
Oh and they do not come to our house as I am not a very good cook!
Nicholas Mason
Well I am the token male in the company so I can call myself the big cheese. I began my tourism and hospitality career 33 years ago in my home country of England in the beautiful Lakes District as a trainee chef and then progressed to front of house as an Assistant Manager.
After a few years I left the countryside and went to London to become a Butler to the worlds rich and famous in a 5 star Park Lane hotel for a number of years and then emigrated to Australia where I continued with 5 star hotel companies and progressed to the position of General Manager here in Palm Cove (I am one of the 5 that were at the same resort as some of our current team members)
In 2005 myself and my wife took the bold step of declining a huge overseas promotion to build our dream business right here in Cairns Tropical North Queensland. Our first company was The Tour Specialists which grew very rapidly and then in 2009 we built The Cairns Holiday Specialists and if that was not enough to keep us all busy we launched Register Your Wedding December 2011.
We wanted to create not only great businesses but we wanted to also make a difference in the tourism experience visitors receive from their travel company, so we set about finding team members that were truly passionate and knowledgeable about this region just as we were.
We wanted our team to know each and every hotel, resort, apartment and accommodation venue personally so they could give our customers the right advice and the best accommodation to suit their needs.
Our team regularly go out and inspect new properties and they also have lots of fun experiencing all of the local tours and attractions so they can package the perfect holiday for our guests.
A few weeks after our guests return home we send them a "Welcome Home" letter with a short survey which asks them about the service they received from The Cairns Holiday Specialists, their experience at the hotel and the tours that we had recommended for them.
We are very proud of these surveys as it shows our team are doing a fantastic job and we would love it if you took the time to reads some of these reviews. Oh and I can say yes we do post the negative one's also if we happen to receive them.
