Emmy Award winning travel expert Colleen Kelly is as comfortable in the Midwest as she is in Austria, where she spent a year while in college. That love of travel led her to help produce and host 24/7 for NBC. Her priorities changed when she became a mom and realized there were no television shows in the U.S. focusing on family travel.

Kelly joined with Patricia Fusilero, who had helped launch 24/7, to launch Family Travel with Colleen Kelly on Public Television (PBS) in the fall of 2013.


Each half hour episode gives a behind-the-scenes look at a destination visited by Kelly and her family. They provide all the details you need to replicate family-friendly vacations.

Colleen Kelly spent a lot of time during her childhood traveling around the world and she’s doing it on Family Travel with Colleen Kelly, but the Chicago native has found some places close to home she wanted to tell us about.

Marcia Frost: How did you become interested in travel?
Colleen Kelly: My father worked for Hertz. So he was in the travel industry and he was a corporate executive. When my father traveled for work he would take us with him on a lot of trips. My mother would come and their big motto was, ‘travel is education.’ When we’d travel, we’d be in the one hotel room that my dad got from the corporate office so we could save money, but the big thing with my mother was to show us museums and different foods and different people.

That’s probably what started my obsession with traveling. Then, when I got to college, I went abroad and lived in Austria for a year.

MF: What was that like?
CK: I love it. They had an international public   program. I lived with a family that didn’t speak any English and I learned German – I had only spoke Spanish. I loved it so much that when I met my husband I couldn’t stop talking about it so we went over there and he proposed to me in Salzburg. When we were in Salzburg, there were so many beautiful castles that we decided to get married there.

We got married in Austria. We brought in over 50 people and we had events for four days and I had a fairytale wedding.

MF: When did you get interested in family travel?
CK: I had kids. My husband loves to travel too and I said ‘this was going to be a lot harder, they have all this stuff!’ So, I had my two daughters and we traveled anyway.

Then I started a show at NBC with my sister (Catie Keogh) and another business partner, Patricia (Fusilero). It’s on now. It’s called 24/7. We basically pitched it to NBC and it’s been on 10 years now. My sister’s the host and it has celebrities, lifestyle, and dining, and is basically all about Chicago.

After a few years of doing that, Patricia, also my business partner at Travels and Productions, and I both felt we had to do a travel show and it had to be national.

Of course, everybody wants to do a travel show. Somebody said, do what you know and find a hook. Between her family and mine we have five kids. We thought there had to be a show about family travel out there, even two or three. We kept looking and looking, and it’s never been done in the United States. We were shocked.

At this time I was interviewing a celebrity, Lionel Ritchie. He’s got kids. I said I was leaving the show at NBC and doing this new show and he was like, ‘I can’t believe it’s never been done before.’ Then he said, ‘You know why it’s never been done before, I just figured it out -- nobody really wants to travel with their kids.’ (laughter)

We started that show. We pitched it to Discovery (Channel) and Discovery wanted a reality Honey Boo Boo kind of show. PBS said they’d take it national and we could put in education and culture and history.

MF: It’s been very successful.

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