Andres Serra

The trip was supposed to be the exciting part. Instead, you’ve got forty open tabs, six versions of the same hotel comparison, and a low hum of dread every time you think about opening the laptop again. I’ve been there. What you’re feeling has a name: decision fatigue, and it happens to careful planners more than … Read more

Every genuine hidden gem I’ve ever found stopped being hidden within about a year of someone writing about it, which is the problem with almost every article on how to find hidden gems when traveling. They hand you a list, the list gets shared, and the place stops being what made it worth visiting. After years of … Read more

After planning more than 500 trips for myself and others, I’ve learned that the most common travel planning mistakes have almost nothing to do with forgetting your charger. A carefully planned trip still turns stressful when the itinerary ignores how travel actually works: the real transfer times, the queues, the fatigue by day four, the delays, … Read more

A travel planner generally focuses on researching and designing a personalised trip, while a travel agent (or travel advisor) traditionally focuses on booking and managing reservations. In practice, the line is blurrier than that. Plenty of agents now build itineraries, and plenty of planners will book things for you too, so the titles alone won’t tell … Read more

Ask ChatGPT to plan your trip, and you’ll have a rough itinerary in under a minute, which is genuinely impressive and worth taking seriously. It’s become a normal first step for a lot of travellers, and there’s a good reason for that.The honest comparison between a human travel planner and an AI trip planner isn’t … Read more

Multigenerational travel planning gets complicated fast. Get grandparents, parents, and grandchildren into one trip and you’re suddenly juggling different budgets, different interests, different schedules, and different ideas of a good day. Add in mobility needs, dietary requirements, or a toddler’s nap schedule, and it’s easy to see why so many of these trips get planned badly, … Read more

Most advice on how to plan a trip when you have no time starts with “begin six months early,” which is useless if you’re reading this three weeks out with a full inbox. After planning hundreds of trips for myself and others, I’ve learned that the time drain was never the trip itself. It’s the endless … Read more

Most articles on how much a travel planner costs manage to talk for a thousand words without ever giving you a number. I’ll do the opposite. After years of planning trips for myself and others, here’s the honest headline: most travel planners charge somewhere between $100 and $1,500 to plan a trip, depending on the model … Read more

Planning a high-quality family holiday sounds like a treat until you’re twenty tabs deep, trying to line up a villa that sleeps six, flights where you’re actually sitting together, activities that suit both a toddler and a teenager, and a pace that doesn’t leave anyone in tears by day three. I plan these trips for a … Read more