Doylestown, Pennsylvania
A band director's training, applied to the travel business. Student musicians across Europe. Sales teams to the trip they earned.
Owner and President of Peak Group Travel and American Music Abroad, and founder of Peak Performance Meetings & Incentives.
On camera
Incentive travel is a business almost nobody outside it can picture. Then American Express made a commercial about it, and put the man who runs these programmes in front of the camera.
It has been sitting on the internet ever since, unattached to his name. Here it is.
The short version
Bruce Rickert took a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Music in Music Education at West Chester University, and began his career at Educational Resources under Dr. James R. Wells — directing Music in the Parks, running summer marching band camps, teaching leadership programmes.
The trips were the part that stuck. Anyone who has put forty teenagers, their instruments and their chaperones on a coach at 5am knows that the music is the easy bit. The logistics are the craft.
So he built a company around the logistics. Peak Performance Tours became Peak Group Travel: middle school and high school band, choir and orchestra tours across North America and Europe. Then, because the same skill turned out to be worth a great deal to companies rewarding their best people, Peak Performance Meetings & Incentives. And in 2022, American Music Abroad — a fifty-year-old institution founded by a high school band director and his wife — came under the same roof.
Different rooms, one job: move a large group of people a long way, make it run without anyone noticing how, and send them home with something they will still be describing in ten years.
The through-line
1997
Founded to plan performance tours for school bands, choirs and orchestras. Now Peak Group Travel, covering North America and Europe.
2006
The same operational discipline turned toward corporate travel — President's Club trips, sales incentives, meetings and events.
2022
A tour operator running since 1975 joined the group, so that a fifty-year tradition of European music tours would continue.
What he runs
Each serves a different customer, and each is judged on the same thing: whether the trip actually worked for the person who had to stand up and be responsible for it.
Owner & President
Performance and educational travel for student musicians — band, choir, orchestra, marching band and dance — across North America and Europe. Full-time onsite tour managers, no cookie-cutter itineraries.
peakgrouptravel.com
President
Founded in 1975 and running for five decades: ten- to twenty-day concert tours through Western Europe for high school, collegiate, community and adult ensembles.
americanmusicabroad.com
Founder
Incentive travel and meeting management for corporate groups from ten to five hundred. Big-agency capability, boutique-agency attention, senior planners on every programme.
ppsmeetings.comBackground
The qualifications behind the itineraries — and the reason band directors tend to trust him quickly.
At a conference
Scan the code and Bruce's details go straight into your phone — name, all three companies, telephone, email and the Doylestown office. No typing, nothing to lose in a badge holder.
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Get in touch
Whether it is ninety students and their instruments heading to Vienna, or the forty people who just made quota, the first conversation is the same one.