It started with
twenty wasted hours.

The twenty hours

You decide on ten days in Japan. You search “10 days Japan blog”. Five articles later you've been reading for two hours, every one of them says something different, and you have no way of knowing which of these strangers to trust. Days later you're still at it, and you still don't feel sure.

The problem was never a shortage of information. There's far too much of it. The problem is that it's scattered across dozens of places at wildly different levels of quality, and sorting it costs you the one thing you were trying to save.

“I don't have the time or the patience to spend twenty hours researching a trip — and when I do, I still don't feel sure about any of it.”

The two options, and why neither works

Faced with that, most people do one of two things.

Book with an agency. It's expensive, and the “personalised” trip is often a template. We know this from the inside — from having worked in one. Agencies tend to send client after client to the same hotels on the same routes. What they're really selling isn't exclusive knowledge. It's saved time and the feeling of being safe.

Or plan it yourself. Which costs you the twenty hours, and still leaves you going in half-blind: you've read a hundred blogs and you're not certain about any of it, and you don't know what you forgot to even think about.

The question that started this

If what you're really buying from an agency is time and confidence — not secret information — then it should be possible to sell you the same thing without the markup.

That's the whole idea. Replace the twenty hours with judgment someone already formed by going, and replace the feeling of safety with something that keeps showing up before, during and after the trip. Without booking anything for you, and without taking a cut of what you book, so there's nothing to skew what we tell you.

What we decided not to be

We are not a travel agency, and that's a deliberate choice rather than a stage we haven't reached yet. We don't handle your bookings or your money. You book directly with the hotel, the airline, whoever — which keeps the trip yours, keeps the cost down, and keeps our advice free of any interest in where you spend.

We inform and we accompany. We don't manage and we don't take charge. It's the same sentence whether you apply it to the product, to the business, or to the way we write.