The taste to choose. The discipline to deliver.
KC&E is Caitlin and Collin Daulong. The work has two halves: knowing what deserves a place in your year — which valley, which month, which table, which property is actually worth the name — and the unglamorous discipline that makes it all arrive without a visible seam. Both of them do both halves. There is no split between planner and guide, and no handoff between the person who designs your trip and the person who answers for it.
Caitlin spent close to ten years living in Rome, working as a VIP guide at the top of the private market. That is where you learn that the difference between a good day and an extraordinary one is almost never the itinerary — it's who opens the door, which table, which hour of the day. Her family is Italian, and much of the depth in our Italian work traces back through her. She holds the standing file behind every client relationship: how you take your coffee, what you won't eat, which table you liked and which you didn't. That file goes ahead of you to every property and kitchen before you land.
Collin grew up with a Navy pilot for a father and family in Rome and Greece — a household run on aviation-grade logistics, and a childhood spent flying back to the Mediterranean to see relatives. The rigor and the appetite both came from that. A former elite endurance cyclist, he reads terrain the way most planners read a brochure, which is why every KC&E route is ridden before a client sees it rather than pulled from a file. He builds the operational layer of each trip — guides, drivers, mechanics, support vehicles — including the honest assessment of where a vehicle genuinely cannot follow.
It started in New England.
We both grew up traveling — extensively, and young enough that it shaped everything since. You learn early that travel isn't consumption. Done properly, it rearranges you.
We started the company in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont in 2015, as Kingdom Cycling and Experiences. The first trip anyone ever paid us for was a multi-day cycling retreat in Vermont that year. That client is still a client, eleven years later. We think about that fact more than any other in this business.
In 2017 we left our jobs to do this properly.
And then we spent a few years doing what everyone else does — group trips. Fixed departures, a van, a dozen people who didn't choose each other. It took us longer than it should have to admit the model itself was the problem. Group travel can't be exceptional, because scale forces repetition. To fill departures you need hotels that take blocks, routes that work for every ability, and towns that can absorb a coach. The itinerary gets designed for the average of the group, which means it fits nobody exactly. The pace belongs to whoever is slowest and whoever is loudest. And nothing can change on the ground on the morning of day four, because eleven other people are locked in.
The large operators are mills. That isn't an insult — it's a description of what volume requires.
So we went the other way. Fewer clients, known personally, over years. Routes we ride ourselves before anyone else does. Places chosen because they're right for one family, not because they can hold a group. And a trip that can change on a Tuesday morning, because there's nobody else to consult.
What we're selling isn't logistics. It's the thing travel did to us when we were young — the expansion that only happens somewhere real, with enough room to notice it. That's very hard to deliver at scale. So we don't try.
Two principals, and a bench in every region.
Two people can't be everywhere, so we don't pretend to be. Behind every trip is a concierge desk you can reach directly, and in each region a person on the ground we've worked with for years — a concierge in Marrakech, a host and mountain-bike expert in Val Gardena, drivers who know the roads, mechanics who know the bikes. They're added to your WhatsApp thread before you fly. And because your standing file travels with the trip, whoever picks up already knows how you take your coffee.
Italy isn't a destination we added.
Both our families are from Italy. One of us spent a decade living in Rome, working the top of the private guiding market. There is family in Rome and in Naples, and the ties are still active — this is a country we return to for reasons that have nothing to do with the business.
That shows up in the work in ways that are difficult to fake. The relationships we have on the ground took thirty years to build and can't be bought at any price. We know which guide in Rome is worth the money and which is a name on a list. We know which properties actually deliver in October and which coast on a reputation earned a decade ago. We know when a hill town is worth the drive and when it's a coach park with a view.
It's also why our Italian portfolio runs deeper than anyone would expect from a company our size: the Dolomites, Lake Como, Umbria, Tuscany, Sardinia, Abruzzo, the Argentario coast, Rome. Each of those is a genuinely different country underneath, and we plan them that way.
is still a client
Kingdom of Vermont
KC&E is a d’Aulon company. d’Aulon is a family-owned travel and hospitality house: we run our own properties, design trips, and build the systems behind them. More at daulon.house.
Tell us who's travelling
and what a good day looks like.
That is genuinely the whole brief. We come back with a shape for the trip — or for the year — within a few days.