About Penny Matthews, Travel Designer and River Cruise Specialist
Penny Matthews, ACC, is a Travel Designer and River Cruise Specialist based in Leduc, Alberta, and the founder of One Luxe Journey.
She helps women and couples 45+ plan European river cruises and rail journeys for life's next chapter.
There's a difference between booking a river cruise and crafting one. I know the difference, because I've lived both sides of it.
I've sailed the Rhine, Danube, Moselle and Rhône, more than once and across several cruise lines. What I know comes from standing on the deck, walking the shore excursions and dining in the restaurants, and understanding firsthand what makes a river journey exceptional.
For more than a decade, my life ran on other people's emergencies.
At 40, I fell and fractured my spine, and spent years fighting a medical system more interested in managing my pain than restoring my life. At 43, surgical menopause. Then a family mental health crisis, the kind that reshapes everyone in the house and keeps you in survival mode for years at a stretch. Business losses. COVID taking the travel business I had built from nothing. More than a decade of holding everything together for everyone around me, while my own body and my own dreams waited on the other side, quietly and sometimes not so quietly.
My nervous system forgot how to rest.
Travel was always woven through my life. It was my work, my love, my intention. But the version that was just for me, the slow-mornings-in-Europe version, the time-that-belongs-entirely-to-me version, kept getting pushed to later.
And then I got on a river.
I don't know how to fully explain what happened the first time I was on a river cruise with nowhere to be and no one waiting. The scenery moved past the window. Someone brought me exactly what I needed before I asked. The hours had a different quality: unhurried, present, finally mine.
For the first time in years, I exhaled. A long, slow exhale, the kind you feel all the way down in your shoulders. You already know what I mean.
I am 53. I'm still navigating my own health, and my body carries the weight of the last decade. And I am also, right now, with all of that still true, building the life I kept deferring.
I decided to stop waiting.
If you're reading this and recognizing yourself, that's no coincidence. It's already your turn.
One Luxe Journey exists because the woman who most deserves an extraordinary experience is often the last one to give herself permission to have it.
If the name is new to you, the woman behind it isn't. One Luxe Journey carries forward the work I began as One River at a Time and, before that, Hidden Gems Travel. Different name, same promise: I show up for every journey I craft.
The most luxurious thing I can offer you is how a trip feels. For me, luxury is the warmth in the details: someone anticipating your need before you voice it, meals you didn't have to plan, a morning that is entirely yours. For a woman who has been “on” for everyone else for years, that feeling is necessary, and it's what I build into every journey I craft.
I measure a trip by what it gives back to you.
River cruising is the most elegant answer I know to every reason women give themselves for not going.
- ✦Choosing the cruise line, ship and itinerary that fit how you actually like to travel
- ✦Explaining what's included, what isn't, and where the trade-offs are
- ✦Planning the whole journey, from airfare and transfers to the final hotel night
- ✦Adding rail journeys and pre- and post-cruise extensions, with ocean journeys to follow
Questions I hear often
- ✦ACC
- ✦Accredited Luxury Travel Specialist (The Luxury Academy)
- ✦CLIA RiverView Certified
- ✦CLIA Luxury Cruise Certified
- ✦AmaWaterways Specialist
- ✦Avalon Waterways Specialist
Bookings are made through TTAND, Travel Leaders Network.
View Penny's CLIA certificates
It's your turn now.
If you've been saying “one day,” reach out and tell me where you'd go first.
A personal note
When you're ready, I'm here
No pressure, no commission-driven pitch. Just an unhurried conversation about the river, the season, and the ship that fits where you are in life right now.
— Penny