The story of Asia Desk goes back to the 1970s when

G.W. “Sandy” Ferguson, Managing Director, first got

involved in the travel industry. After spending most of his

youth in Asia, Sandy graduated from high school in Bangkok, finished college, and then initially gained work experience through a position with a regional Asian air carrier. Still, a bigger adventure was yet to come.

In 1976, long before the reforms of today, Sandy began working for an

outfitter specializing in travel to the newly-opened People's Republic of China.

As a tour escort, he explored the hitherto forbidden country for several years before returning

to Thailand to live, work, and start a family (his son Jackson, below, still lives in Thailand). Inspired and experienced, it was back in Thailand that Sandy first opened his own destination services company, which grew to include additional offices in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Sandy was actually one of the first to begin operating in Vietnam when the country opened its doors to tourists in 1987. It was also in Vietnam that he met his wife, Tran Phi Nga, who had similarly founded one of Vietnam’s earliest

private tour companies. Sandy and Nga collaborated with each other for many years in the travel business before coming to America, in 1994, to provide receptive services for the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta. After they

decided that they would quite like to stay in Georgia, Sandy spent several years working for the Asia-Pacific division of American Express before finally having the chance to re-create his old company, stateside, and this time with a new name: Asia Desk.

Since its inception, the goal of Asia Desk has been to provide professional, destination-specific travel services via the use of Sandy and Nga’s private network of friends and family still residing in Asia. These associates, without a doubt, are some of the most capable and sincere people in the business. Each newly-arriving visitor is treated with the utmost level of personalized care by our local hosts, who have specifically been hand-picked for their

deep cultural knowledge, precise English-language skills, and innate understanding of what it

takes to provide a quailty and memorable travel experience. Moving forward, Asia Desk will continue to be a family-owned and family-operated enterprise where personal attention is the norm, not the exception.