Our MISSION is to harness the POWER of travel ...

  • ... to bring folks together, to connect in meaningful ways with our loved ones, to understand and celebrate our cultural differences, to broaden our horizons, and to find magic in the extraordinary and the everyday.
Capri with Jack and the Faraglioni

D*Lux Travel

Now in its 20th year, D*Lux Travel is a premier purveyor of experiential and luxury travel to Italy and beyond. We design itineraries for clients travelling privately (see Trip Planning & Concierge Service). We accept new clients on a referral basis only and offer the highest level of personalized service, whether you choose to travel at the 5-star level or boutique level. We constantly invest in onsite research to find the exceptional people, hotels, and experiences that make your trip extraordinary.

Affiliations

  • We are an independent affiliate of Cadence Travel, a $150 million Virtuoso agency and full service travel management company with a team of over 150 industry leaders and award-winning travel specialists.
  • Through our affiliation with Cadence, we are members of Virtuoso, the travel industry's leading luxury network, consisting of Virtuoso advisers specializing in creating exceptional travel itineraries and Virtuoso partners specializing in world-class customer service and experiences.
  • We regularly attend ILTM Cannes, an annual conference consisting of highly curated meetings between the most exclusive and sought after travel designers and the world’s finest hospitality brands, and PURE, a by-invitation-only association best described as a global community of mavericks re-imagining the role of high-end experiential travel to positively impact conservation efforts and transform lives.
ILTM a.png
Cadence Logo.png
Vir_Logo_Member_Color_RGB a.png
ILTM.png
Ravello.jpg
Capri with Margo
Reggia di Caserta.jpg
at San Giorgio Maggiore Venice
with Ale on the sailboat

Diana Dopson, Founder

Diana is an artist and art historian from Austin, Texas, whose love of all things Italian was sparked 29 years ago in a graduate course in Renaissance architecture. She began working in Italy in 1998 for a visionary company which pioneered the luxury active travel sector. She has designed and guided countless trips since then all over Italy, from Venice to Sicily, from historic town centers to the charming countryside. Her Italian friends joke that she knows Italy better than they do! Fluent in Italian, Diana loves researching new places to share.

Diana received her M.F.A. in photography and her M.A. in art history from the University of Oregon, with a concentration in Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture. In 1998, she completed the Corso Internazionale sull’Architettura di Andrea Palladio in Vicenza, Italy, an in-depth study of the buildings of Palladio in the Veneto. She holds undergraduate degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was also an All-American tennis player and valedictorian of the College of Natural Sciences. In her free time, Diana enjoys playing tennis, reading a good book, and being with her Italian dog, Jack (Neapolitanissimo!).

Her work as an artist primarily explores the nature of vision or ways of seeing, the interconnectedness of living things, the collecting and cataloguing of nature, and alternating visions of wild and cultivated landscapes. She has had solo shows in Austin, Marfa, Lubbock, and Houston, Texas. Stephen L. Clark Gallery in Austin represents her work. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, the Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, Massachusetts, the Bailey Howe Library of the University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, and the University Public Art Collection of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas.