When Cooee Tours opened its doors in a small Brisbane office in 1991, the founding principle was unfashionable at the time: one specialist would plan, book, and run each client's trip end-to-end. No hand-offs, no being passed between sales reps, no separation between the person who quoted and the person who delivered.
The early years were Australian-only — Reef trips, Red Centre expeditions, Tasmania circuits, the Whitsundays under sail. The clients were almost entirely Queenslanders and northern New South Welsh travellers wanting to see their own country properly, with someone who actually knew the operators on the ground.
By the late nineties, the same clients wanted to cross the Tasman. Aotearoa New Zealand became the second region — first the South Island, then both islands, then the premium rail journeys. The specialist team grew, but the one-specialist-per-trip principle didn't change.
The 2000s opened the door to international travel. Italy and Japan first, then East Africa, the Sacred Valley, Vietnam, Antarctica. Today Cooee Tours covers six continents and more than fifty countries — but every trip, regardless of where it goes, is still planned by one specialist out of our Brisbane office.
We moved to Level 2, 200 Adelaide Street in the Brisbane CBD in 2018, where we still are. The team has grown but stays deliberately small. We operate from depots in Sydney, Melbourne, Cairns, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast, but the planning desk — the place where your trip is actually shaped — remains Brisbane.
