Designing the perfect trip depends on your aims, travel style, budget and interests. Our goal is to make great trips, not great profits.
Designing a trip professionally is a very complex and delicate procedure, depending on what your aims are, what your travel style, your budget, your interests and dozens of other minor parameters. There are people who like a slow itinerary pace, and people who like it compact. Those who love history, and those who love nature, luxury travellers and backpackers, foodies and adventurers. Needless to say, there is quite the difference between organising a trip for personal purposes, and for accommodating to a grand variety of individual interests, and of course that is what mainly separates a traveller and a travel consultant. It is a very tiring job, but full of thrilling excitement.
It does not suffice to get the telephone number of a local taxi driver eager to help you tour a certain city; you must find a company of taxi drivers, and one with good reviews, so that you can ensure trip continuity and a certain quality of services rendered. Just the name of a guesthouse is not enough; do they have enough rooms, to accommodate a larger group? Do they offer free wifi, breakfast, parking or airport transfers? How easy it is to communicate with them or complete the booking?
As our experience grew over the years, we have learned to read between the lines, and we have developed certain quality specifications, such as the following.
- Use a large booking engine to find results and compare reviews, but cross-check with other sources
- Offer 5 different accommodation options in each destination, ranging from hostel to 5* resort
- Have 3 different local partners, to ensure availability of services and cover varied travel styles
- Select local operators based on their quickness to respond, flexibility to demands, and good reviews
- Aim to design flexible itineraries at only 50% of the cost of a similar length group tour programme
Furthermore, however difficult it may be, we insist on designing our own itineraries, and not sale something directly from the shelf of a local operator, as most of the travel agencies sadly do these days, acting just as intermediate mass merchants of tourist packages. We carry on the experience of tailored business consulting into travel organising, using the same core principles of attention to detail, flexibility, and respecting the unique individual interests. Above all, we think as travellers, not as travel agents. Our goal is to make great trips, not great profits, and we are our own best customers.
