Fancy flying into a volcano or fishing up at a mountain lake? Travel consultants are here to execute your wildest dreams – at a price
- Old-school travel agencies may be a thing of a past, but bespoke experiences curated by a small but global network of advisers are blossoming
Although travel agencies have been vanishing from high streets worldwide, it seems that reports of their complete demise may have been exaggerated.
For those concerned above all to obtain the best price, the internet now provides the opportunity to compare the costs of 17 alternative ways of going almost anywhere, and then 17 ways of booking, be it flights, hotels or entire packages.
Agencies working with narrow margins on high volumes of straight-from-the-brochure sales have been hit hard in the era of click-to-order everything. And for many of them Covid-driven comprehensive refunds and constraints on new bookings delivered the coup de grâce.
But Covid also drove many travellers to reconsider whether they still wanted to move around in large groups through a series of high-traffic “must sees”, and has contributed to growth in personally tailored travel.
The comfortably off are now joining the wealthy, who have long been willing to pay a premium for someone else to do the legwork. They want a consultant who spends time getting to know their preferences, and who has the knowledge, the experience and the contacts to put together bespoke, sometimes unique, high-end travel experiences.
My favourite trips would be to charter a helicopter … doing crazy things like flying into a volcano, or flying up to a mountain lake and doing fishing where nobody goes fishing normally.
Guido Graf is CEO of Switzerland’s DeluxeTargets agency, but his business card just says “Travel Designer”. The point, he says on a video call from Sankt Gallen, is to build a personal connection with the client.
