Why We Want You to Waste Our Time

The message we receive most often starts with an apology.

"I hope this isn't too premature." "We don't have dates yet." "I'm not sure we're ready to commit." "I don't want to waste your time."

It is, without question, the most unnecessary sentence in the English language, and we receive some version of it almost every week. People who have been thinking about a trip for months, sometimes years, who have a rough idea of where they want to go and a sense that they want help getting there, but who have talked themselves into believing that until every detail is confirmed and every date is locked and every person in the party has signed off, reaching out to a travel consultancy is somehow premature.

It is not premature. It is exactly the right moment. And we would very much like you to waste our time.

Why "I Don't Want to Waste Your Time" Is the Most Unnecessary Thing You Can Say to a Travel Consultant

The process matters more than most people expect. Not the booking confirmation, not the deposit, not the moment everything is locked in — the conversation that happens before any of that The one where you work out what you actually want, what the trip is really for, what matters to the people going on it and what doesn't, what you have tried before and what you want to do differently this time.

Such a conversation requires time, as it should. A journey costing $20,000, $40,000, or more merits more than a brief forty-minute phone call and a standard itinerary emailed by Tuesday. It warrants the kind of exchange that occurs when neither party is hurried, and both are sincerely striving to perfect the details.

Some of our client relationships begin a year before a trip happens. Some begin with a single email that says "we're thinking about Italy, maybe next autumn, nothing confirmed yet" and it evolves over several months into something neither party had quite imagined at the start. Some begin with a conversation that doesn't result in a booking at all, but that plants a seed that comes back around six months later when the timing is finally right.

All of those are fine. All of those are welcome. The only version that doesn't work is the one where you talk yourself out of getting in touch at all.

What Do You Actually Need to Start Planning a Bespoke Trip?

A destination, or a region, or even just a feeling: "somewhere warm, somewhere historic, somewhere the children will actually enjoy". A rough timeframe. A sense of the occasion, if there is one. That is genuinely enough to begin.

We do not need confirmed dates. We do not need a finalised guest list. We do not need a budget figure delivered with confidence, because most people do not know what a trip like this should cost until someone walks them through it, and that is part of what the first conversation is for. We do not need you to have done research, because the research is our job. We do not need you to arrive knowing what you want, only that you want something, and that you would like help figuring out what that looks like.

The preference sheet we send at the start of every new enquiry exists precisely because most people find it easier to answer specific questions than to construct a brief from scratch. It takes ten minutes and tells us most of what we need to know to start thinking about your trip seriously. Everything else comes out in conversation.

How Long Does It Take to Plan a Custom Trip? Longer Than You Think, and That's Fine

Not because more planning automatically produces better travel, but because the clients who take their time tend to be the ones who end up with something that is genuinely theirs. They have thought about what they want. They have pushed back on the first idea and asked for something different. They have changed their minds twice about the destination and arrived at something neither of us had considered at the start. That process produces a trip with a shape and a character that a quickly assembled itinerary simply cannot match.

We have also seen what happens when people skip it. When they decide the process feels like too much, or that they probably can't justify the time, or that there must be a simpler option, and they book something through a large agency with a 1,000-tab home page that promises a "seamless experience" and delivers exactly the same template it always delivers: fine on paper, forgettable in person, assembled by someone who has already moved on to the next file. They come back having spent more than they expected and enjoyed it less than they hoped, and the trip they were actually thinking about - the one they mentioned in passing before they talked themselves out of it - is still sitting there, unplanned.

We are not telling you this to be unkind about the competition, but because we hear this story with some regularity, and because it is almost always preceded by the same sentence: "I wasn't sure if we could afford you." Usually, they could. Sometimes they spent more not working with us than they would have working with us. Almost always, they wish they had just sent the email.

Ready to Start Planning? Here's How to Get in Touch

Tell us you are thinking about a trip. Tell us it is vague and half-formed and you are not sure of the dates and one person in the party is still deciding whether they can get the time off work. Tell us you have a rough idea but no real plan. Tell us you just want to know what is possible.

We will write back. We will ask a few questions. We will begin to get a sense of what the trip might look like and whether we are the right people to plan it. And if the timing is not right yet, we will still be here when it is.

The worst outcome of sending that email is a pleasant exchange that goes nowhere for now. The best outcome is considerably more interesting.

We want you to waste our time. It is, genuinely, what we are here for.