2023 marks 50 years of Olivia, the leading travel company for lesbian and bisexual women. The company offers a range of all-inclusive vacations for sapphics to make friends or find love!
“From large cruises to resorts, intimate riverboats to adventure vacations, we always charter the entire ship or resort so that you can always feel free to be yourself,” Olivia’s website reads. “Exceptional entertainment, friendly personalized service from Team Olivia, bucket list destinations and friendships that last a lifetime are just some of the highlights you will find on an Olivia vacation. Experience the magic for yourself!”
Launched in 1973 as a radical women’s music label, Olivia began offering cruises in 1990. It has since hosted more than 350,000 women on cruises and resort holidays all over the world.
Remember the original L Word episode “Land Ahoy,” 2005, season 2, episode 10, where Dana dresses up as a captain while role-playing with Alice on a huge ship? That was on an Olivia ship!
KD Lang and Melissa Etheridge have performed at Olivia events and tennis legend Billie Jean King has been a guest speaker seven times. Not long before her death, Maya Angelou gave one of her last speeches at an Olivia Summit.
Jai Henrietta, who has travelled with Olivia six times, replayed the first time she went on an Olivia cruise. “I just stood there with my mouth open,” she said to the Guardian. “Seeing 2,000 women in one space, all cuddling, holding hands, and kissing – it was a utopia for me.”
Henrietta and her partner Lyla Row, who has been on 13 Olivia trips, love the way Olivia takes away the “extra precaution” same-sex female couples take when travelling. “It’s relaxing, and that’s what a holiday should be – you shouldn’t be worrying about anything else.”
Naturally, being a lesbian cruise, romance is all around. Donna Shands was working for Olivia in 2015 when she saw a guest walking alongside the pool. “It was almost like a cartoon character where your eyes go ‘boing!’” says Shands, who also created Olivia’s programs for women of color. “She had on a cute little bathing suit.”
The woman’s name was Cassandra Butler and the pair, who made a “real connection,” talked for an hour by the pool. They’re married now and live in Maryland. Shands has also officiated a wedding between two women who met on an Olivia cruise!
…But all of these relationships and friendships easily could never have happened. Despite selling out each planned trip, the president of Olivia Travel, Judy Dlugacz, says that turning Olivia Records into a travel company was only difficult because “nobody wanted to charter a ship to us.”
In fact, it was a Greek family cruise line that finally said yes. To reassure her, the captain asked Dlugacz where Sappho–the ancient lesbian poet–was from. Dlugacz hesitated, but the man said, “the isle of Lesbos, and that is where I am from. So there will be no problems on this ship!”
