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Summer Travel Season Starts This Weekend

Annie Splatt
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Unsplash
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Now that steamy summer is upon us, the kids are out of school and business has slowed down for most, people are looking to get out of dodge.

 

Summer travel season unofficially kicks off this weekend with Memorial Day road trips. According to AAA, more than 41.5 million Americans will travel this holiday weekend, nearly five percent more than last year.

 

In light of this, Gulf Coast Live is talking with all sorts of travel experts.

 

Two people with different specialties from Preferred Travel of Naples join the show. Full disclosure: Preferred Travel is a supporter of WGCU Public Media. Connie Moody specializes in cruises, multi-generational travel and groups, while Karen Berger specializes in customized, personal independent travel, Africa, South Pacific, airline tickets.

 

Marsha Kut also joins Gulf Coast Live. She's a field manager with AAA, and later in the hour, AAA spokesperson Mark Jenkins gives us the lowdown on gas prices.

Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.