You can book the same hotel on a website in eleven seconds. Here is what changes when you don't.
It is a fair question, and one we are asked often: in an age when the same suite at the same hotel can be booked on six different websites in under a minute, what is the value of working with a private travel atelier?
The honest answer is that, for many trips, there is none. If you are flying to a familiar city for three nights at a hotel you have stayed in before, the booking website will serve you well. The atelier matters when the trip is more complex than the website is built for, when the address is not the kind of address that takes online reservations, or when the right answer to your question is not yet a question you have thought to ask.
What we actually do
We do not, contrary to the cliché, simply book hotels. Most of what we do is the work that happens before the hotel is chosen. We ask what time of year you have. We ask what you are recovering from, or what you are celebrating. We ask which previous trips left you wanting more, and which left you wanting less. The hotel, when it comes, is a consequence of the conversation, not the starting point.
Once the trip is booked, the work continues. We hold the rooms you actually want — the corner suite, not the room category. We arrange the transfers that the airline app cannot. We write the note to the general manager that gets the table at the restaurant the website said was full. We are, in the language of the trade, the one number you call from anywhere in the world when something does not go to plan.
What it costs
Less than most travellers expect. Our preferred-partner relationships with the hotels we book most often deliver complimentary upgrades, breakfasts, and resort credits that frequently offset our planning fee in full. For most journeys above $15,000 in total spend, the considered traveller is, financially, neutral or ahead by working with us — and is, in every case, materially better travelled.
Who we work with
Travellers who have already decided that the hotel matters. Travellers who are planning the trip of a particular year — a fortieth birthday, a tenth anniversary, a first journey after a difficult chapter. Travellers who do not want to be the project manager of their own holiday.
If that is you, the conversation begins with a fifteen-minute call. We will ask the questions. The journey, in our experience, follows.
