Ad. I work as a travel designer with Savi Escapes and earn commission on trips I arrange. This post is about that work. Full details at the bottom.
If you have ever read something on this site and thought "that looks wonderful, but I have no idea how I would actually organise it", then this post is for you. That is my day job.
Alongside Quills and Crossings, I work as a travel designer with Savi Escapes. So when I am not writing about places, I am arranging trips to them for other people. It felt daft to keep writing the blogs on this site without ever mentioning where most of them come from.
The name sounds grander than the job. Mostly it means I plan trips properly, and then I stay involved once they are booked.
What I am actually good at
I know which suppliers to use. It is the least glamorous part of the job and probably the most useful. Two operators can look identical online and be nothing alike in practice, and you tend to find that out at the worst possible moment.
I will be honest with you about places. If somewhere is overrated, or you have picked the wrong season for it, or the itinerary you found online quietly involves four hours of driving every day, I will tell you before you book rather than after.
I ask better questions. Most people know what they want from a holiday but not how to put it into words. Working that out with you is half the job.
Am I the right fit for you
If you are the sort of person who likes booking your own holidays and likes having control over every part of the booking, then my service probably is not for you. Some people love that, and I completely understand it.
But if you are someone who hates booking holidays, or there is simply too much going on in your life to keep on top of it all, then maybe I am the answer.
That is usually where I come in. Trips with moving parts. Multiple stops that need to fall in the right order. A group who all want slightly different things. Somewhere you have never been and cannot really judge from photographs. A honeymoon, a big birthday, a first family trip abroad, anything where getting it right actually matters to you.
Those are the trips where the difference between a wonderful fortnight and an exhausting one is almost always in the planning, and that is the part I genuinely enjoy.
What I am not
I am not cheaper than the internet at its most aggressive. If your only measure is the lowest possible number, you will beat me sometimes.
I am also not a fit for everyone. Some people love the research and the spreadsheets and the slow building of an itinerary over months. If that is you, genuinely, enjoy it. That is how I ended up doing this for a living.
What I specialise in
No two travel agents are the same, and I think that is the part people do not realise. We all have our own corners of the world and our own obsessions.
Mine is adventure. I am part of the adventure team, so if you want to stand under the northern lights, go on safari, or take an expedition ship to Antarctica and wake up surrounded by penguins, I am your girl. Those are the trips I get excited about, the ones I read about in my own time, and the ones where I know which operator to trust and which month actually works.
If your dream trip is somewhere else entirely, that is genuinely fine. Which brings me to the useful bit.
How it works, and why you do not have to pick me
You do not need to work with me at all.
If you follow the link below, you can sign up and fill in a short form describing the sort of holiday you have in mind. From there you can choose me as your agent, or you can choose somebody else on the team.
And if you leave that part blank, you will be matched with the consultant whose specialism fits your trip best. Which is often the better outcome. Somebody who spends their working life planning honeymoons in the Maldives, or family trips to Florida, or slow rail journeys through Europe, will do a better job of those than I would, because that is where their knowledge lives.
I would rather you had the right person than that the right person was me.
If it is an adventure you are after, though, I would love to hear about it.
Design My Holiday — start your form here
A note on the two businesses
Quills and Crossings and Savi Escapes are separate businesses and are not the same company. Quills and Crossings is my own travel writing and publishing project, and it is where this blog and my guidebooks live. Savi Escapes is the travel agency I work with as a travel designer.
This post is about my work with Savi Escapes, and I earn commission on trips arranged through them. Nothing I have written here about places, anywhere on this site, is influenced by that. If somewhere is not worth your money I will say so, including when it is somewhere I could have sold you.
Any booking made through Savi Escapes is made with Savi Escapes and is subject to their terms and conditions, not those of Quills and Crossings.
You can find Savi Escapes at savi-escapes.co.uk.
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