Founder Alan Day, and his partners have more than 100 years of collective experience in the travel industry. They also have special needs children and understand first-hand what precautions are necessary to create a safe and enjoyable space for individuals with ASD while away from home.
Welcome to Autism Double-Checked
Alan Day is a highly experienced and accomplished travel agent. He began his agency career with Liberty Travel in 1999 and then, on moving to Connecticut in 2005, he formed his own travel agency.
Alan’s son has Autism Spectrum Disorder and, based on the significant challenges Autism had on their own family vacations, Alan decided to refocus his agency and specialize in providing assistance and support to the countless families similarly impacted by Autism. For this purpose, he founded ASD Vacations as a unique agency serving such families.
In addition to assisting individual families, Alan produced a unique program called ‘Magic for Autism’ that enabled groups of families to travel together with support at every step of the way: at airports, on board flights, on arrival and at the hotel or resort. To facilitate this mission Alan recognized a desperate need to improve service providers’ understanding of ASD and to better prepare them to assist parents: Autism Double-Checked was born and now provides that training solution.
Co-Founder, David M. Tait OBE has spent most of his career in the commercial aviation business where he has worked closely with several of the industry’s greatest innovators.
After working with the legendary Sir Freddie Laker, in 1983 David joined Richard Branson in crafting the business plan for what would become Virgin Atlantic Airways. The upstart airline began service in mid-1984 between London and New York with a single Boeing 747 and David spent two decades in NYC as Executive Director and EVP, building the critically acclaimed carrier to over $4 billion in annual revenues.
Sir Richard credits Tait with playing a huge role in creating and building the brand platform upon which the Virgin Group has launched hundreds of global ventures.
In 2001 at Buckingham Palace, Queen Elizabeth II awarded David an OBE (Officer of the Order of The British Empire) for “Services to British aviation in the USA”.
A Connecticut resident, Tait holds British, US and Canadian citizenships. He is now a company director, speaker, entrepreneur, consultant and author who also writes an award-winning weekly column for TravelIndustryToday.com .
