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.

Planning work is research, judgement and writing. It is worth paying for when the shape of a trip is genuinely uncertain: an unfamiliar country, a complicated route, limited days, or a group with competing priorities. In those cases a few hundred dirhams of planning routinely changes the character of a trip costing many times that.

It is worth less when you already know where you are going and have been before. Two hours with a good map and a clear head will get you most of the way, and we would rather say so than sell a document you do not need.

There are things planning cannot do at all. It cannot hold a room, guarantee a price, confirm a flight or move you up a waitlist — that is what suppliers and licensed agents do, and we are neither. It cannot advise on visas or entry requirements, which change and depend on your nationality; those belong to official government sources. It cannot replace travel insurance, and it is not an emergency service.

Being clear about that boundary is not modesty. It is the only way the part we do handle can be relied on completely.


Basis for this note. Written from planning practice and publicly verifiable sources. Not a first-person trip report.

General planning method; not specific to one destination.

More from the planning desk

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.

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.