What a travel planner can and cannot do for you
A short, deliberately unglamorous account of where planning work genuinely helps, and where you are better served by a licensed agent, a supplier or your own insurer.
Travel notes
The unglamorous half of a good trip.
These are notes on method rather than destination reviews. Pacing, sequencing, travel time, seasonality and the decisions that quietly determine whether a trip holds together. Every note carries its author, date and the basis it was written from.
Planning a trip for people with different energy levels
Families and mixed groups rarely fall out over destinations. They fall out over the sixth consecutive early start. Here is how to build a plan that does not require everyone to want the same day.
Reading a map for travel time, not distance
Thirty kilometres can be twenty minutes or two hours. Learning to read which is which is most of what separates a plan that holds from one that unravels by day three.
The arithmetic of shoulder season
Travelling either side of peak is usually presented as a compromise on weather. In practice it is a trade between weather, crowding, cost and daylight — and only one of those is usually decisive.
How many bases should a trip have?
A simple rule that saves more trips than any other single planning decision: fewer bases, longer stays, and never a base for one night unless it is buying you something.
Most itineraries fail on pace, not on choice
The trips people regret are rarely the ones with the wrong places on the list. They are the ones with the right places in the wrong order, at the wrong speed.
Not sure which package fits?
Describe the trip in a sentence or two — destination or region, rough dates, how many of you. We will tell you which package fits, or that you do not need one.