It started with a kitchen in Tuscany.

Michael and Paola discovered Tuscany the way most people do — by accident. A trip that was supposed to be two weeks stretched into three months. The cooking class became a friendship. The friendship became a standing invitation. The standing invitation became a deep understanding of what it means to live inside a place rather than visit it.

They returned to the United States with a question: why does that kind of experience — the kind that happens when you are genuinely inside a community rather than passing through it — almost never happen on organized travel? The answer, once they found it, was structural. Most operators are designed to extract. CDV was designed to belong.

In 2006, they incorporated Culture Discovery Vacations and ran their first program — eight people, a farmhouse in the Chianti hills, three local families, and a wine harvest. Every person on that trip has been back at least once since.

For nearly twenty years, CDV ran exclusively leisure programs. We were good at it. Our TripAdvisor Hall of Fame standing, 1,200+ reviews, and 31% repeat rate are the evidence.

The decision to launch a MICE division was not a pivot — it was a recognition. Corporate groups have been showing up in our leisure programs for years. The team-building that happens when twelve colleagues cook a pasta dinner with a Tuscan grandmother is not accidental. It is structural. We built the conditions for it.

The only thing missing was the measurement layer. Meridian solves that. For the first time, we can take the transformation CDV has always produced and show it to a CFO — in a dashboard, in a board-ready report, in 90 days of tracked behavior change. The experience was always there. Now the proof is too.