About Us
We Know What It’s Like to Pack Up and Go
Escapay didn’t start in a boardroom. It started after years of living in places we love enough to put up with the occasional natural disaster.
We’re a family-owned business, and unfortunately, evacuating isn’t theoretical for us. We’ve packed the car, watched the weather obsessively, lost power, lost cell service, scrambled for somewhere to sleep, and tried to figure out how much all of this was going to cost while also wondering what we’d come home to.
One of our most memorable evacuations happened during Hurricane Ian in 2022. Pinellas County ordered mandatory evacuations for Zones A, B and C, and hundreds of thousands of Tampa Bay residents lost power during the storm.
At the time, we were still relatively new to marriage, kids and a mortgage—which is a very expensive combination even when there isn’t a hurricane headed your way.
We got incredibly lucky. Sarah’s dad’s cousin had an empty snowbird house in a retirement community in Ocala and generously offered it to us. So instead of spending hundreds—or potentially thousands—on last-minute hotel rooms, we spent three days living our absolute best evacuation lives: driving everywhere in a golf cart, raiding the liquor cabinet and pretending we had retired several decades early.
It makes for a funny story now.
But without that house, we would have been piling hotel stays, meals, gas and everything else onto a credit card that was already uncomfortably close to maxed out. And that part wasn’t funny at all.
A couple years later, we were living in Texas for a short period when Hurricane Harvey hit. It was summer, we were brand new to the area, and suddenly we had no power and no cell service. This was not part of mandatory evacuation so we hadn’t prepared. We didn’t know the neighborhoods. We didn’t know where to go. We didn’t even know where to start looking for a hotel.
Eventually, we found a brewery that was open and had internet. We sat there pulling up maps and calling hotel after hotel until we finally found one with power—two hours away.
And somehow, after all of that, we still didn’t come up with Escapay.
That took a few more years.
Eventually, though, the idea became pretty obvious: evacuating is expensive, stressful and incredibly disruptive, even when your home ultimately ends up being completely fine.
There should be something that makes the financial part of leaving a little easier.
So we created Escapay.
We’re building this company for families like ours—and for all of the other slightly crazy people who choose to live near beaches, mountains, forests and other beautiful places that occasionally tell us, very firmly, to get out.
Because we understand why you stay.
We adore where we live, too. We wouldn’t trade the sunsets, the water, the trees, the neighborhoods or the life we’ve built just because Mother Nature occasionally gets dramatic.
Our goal with Escape is simple: when the order comes to go, we want to make leaving a little less stressful and coming home a little easier.