What is a personal trip planner? A personal trip planner is an individual or agency that does all the research and planning of a vacation for you. Trip planners are experienced travelers who are intimately familiar with various destinations. The trip planner guiding you may be a former travel agent who also brings field experience. Trip Planners can also be called Travel Advisers or Travel Planners and offer various services from company to company. They act as your single point of contact before and during your trip to ensure everything goes smoothly.
In this article, we’ll review everything you need about personal trip planners to help you find the best one.
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Why use a personal trip planner rather than a travel agent?
Travel agents provide ready-made itineraries/trip packages to choose from. Many offer custom tour packages based on your preferences. But for the most part, they’re concerned with selling the itineraries they’ve already created.
In contrast, personal trip planners focus solely on creating custom itineraries to your needs. They’re the better option when you need help to tailor your trip to your preferences and budget. You have much more flexibility to design a trip you want, with few or no concessions. If you want an itinerary put together just for you, a personal trip planner can serve you better than a travel agent.
Benefits of using a personal trip planner over software
Trip planning software is a do-it-yourself (DIY) route to vacation planning. You get the tools and information to plan your trip. There is no travel expert to do the thinking and planning for you. That said, trip planning software can engage travel experts and share their inputs with customers. These can be in travel blogs, expert-submitted itineraries, or forums where travelers can engage directly with one another. Trip planning software makes it easier to design a custom trip.
A personal trip planner requires you to make some effort, while a travel agency requires you to do nothing. When you hire a personal trip planner, you engage 1-on-1 with a human. Even your minute requirements are heard and well-understood. A machine cannot replicate that level of human-to-human understanding, giving personal trip planners the edge.
Typical services you get with a personal trip planner
Personal trip planners create a personalized itinerary based on the destination you want to visit and the activities you want to do. They may or may not book your flight tickets, accommodation, rentals, and tours. But they offer recommendations and links to book flights, on booking activities or tours that need pre-booking, and restaurants. They also provide tips on currency exchange and other things that will be useful on your trip.
Note that personal trip planners cannot offer the level of customer service a travel agent offers. Their service doesn’t generally include customer service tasks like helping you with issues such as lost tickets or flight rescheduling. As mentioned, some personal trip planners may not book flights, hotels, tours, or transportation but provide guidance or links.
Here’s a list of services you can expect from a personal trip planner:
- Daily itineraries in print, via app, or both
- Flight, tour, and hotel booking or links to book flights or accommodation
- Suggestions on mid-trip plane, bus, or train transportation
- Advice on booking tours or activities that need pre-bookings
- Recommendations on restaurants
- Tips on currencies, safety, converters/adaptors, cultural differences, etc.
- Instructions on getting to and from airports, accommodation, and activities
Personal trip planners don’t all work the same way. Some offer a personal consultation to discuss your desired trip and destination. Others will have you fill out a questionnaire on their website and send you a quote based on your responses. If you proceed, the planner will contact you to plan a custom itinerary.
How much does a travel planner cost?
Factoring in the weekly or hourly rates (hourly rates are calculated off an average trip plan costing 15 hours of work from the trip planner), using a trip planner will cost around $210 to $1,880 for a 7-day trip. There is a huge variance in the range that may compensate depending on how much attention they offer, skill level, and expedited planning. Further, the median we found was $450, and the average was about $700. Travel-Wise researched 50 popular personal trip planner websites to help collect the running costs for you for these services.
Trip planners know how to save money and can ultimately save you by ensuring you go on your trip prepared with the best booking and cost-saving strategies their expertise can afford. However, their rates can seem steep on paper, and you are not guaranteed cost savings.
We also found a lot of websites not upfront about their pricing, which we recommend steering clear from. Transparent pricing is a must, in our opinion.
What to look for when hiring a good personal trip planner?
Trip planners’ knowledge of the region is a foremost consideration. If they don’t know the place well, they’re not qualified to plan a trip there for anyone. Ask the planner directly whether they’ve been to the destination before and how many trips they’ve planned to the region, and feel free to ask any questions about the place for which you’ve looked up answers to gauge their knowledge.
Do they get kickbacks and commissions? Personal trip planners may also push certain hotels, car rental companies, and tour providers like travel agents. It doesn’t hurt to ask if they’re getting a commission, especially if your online search tells you there are better and cheaper alternatives than your planner recommends.
Is the planner a frequent traveler? If so, they know what they’re talking about and can be relied upon. Check if they have a blog on which they give free tips and advice. Also, check their social media pages. If everything checks out, you have nothing to worry about.
When should you consider a personal trip planner?
No time to plan your trip? Visiting a part of the world unfamiliar to you? Seldom go on vacations? Transfer personal travel planning to the hands of a trip planner.
Another situation in which you might consider hiring a trip planner is if you need to plan a vacation on short notice. Perhaps you’re mixing business with pleasure and taking your family along but have only so much time to create a memorable travel itinerary. Or you’ve planned to attend a colleague’s or your neighbor’s wedding in another country and want to make the most of the opportunity to discover the place.
Another reason to consider a personal trip planner is if you want to go off the beaten track or satisfy your unique tastes. Your trip planner may be able to give you insider tips or even point you to their contacts in the region who will show you around or offer recommendations.
What is an alternative to a personal trip planner?
A travel planning app that gives intelligent recommendations and adds a human touch with advice from avid travelers comes close to a living, breathing personal trip planner. Our website, Travel-Wise, is a worthwhile option. All of the base trip planning services are free of charge.
Travel-Wise gives you the tools to plan and organize your trip. It allows you to collaborate on the trip with your travel companions. You can share itineraries and maps with them, with everyone remaining on the same page. This helps create understanding and harmony and offers safety at your destination.
Our service can do much of what a trip planner can, thanks to its intelligent artificial intelligence (AI) brain that gathers information from the internet to create custom travel itineraries. For more perspective, you can go through our itineraries submitted by experienced travelers.
Our travel guides are an excellent place to start your research, providing in-depth information on various aspects of a trip. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of what to expect so that you can plan accordingly.
You can also check out the Travel-Wise community on Reddit for experience-backed tips and advice. Ask a question or share your input to help out fellow travelers. Reddit has a private messaging feature, so you can contact someone for more information or inquire if they’re looking for trip companions.
Want to create memories of your trip and share them on social media? Travel-Wise’s journaling feature allows you to add your personal stories, notes, pictures, and experiences on our app/site for sharing.
Ready to kickstart trip planning?
Relational information is your best ally when you’re looking to create unforgettable travel experiences. A personal travel planner can provide it, but so can AI trip-planning apps like Travel-Wise. If you prefer engaging 1-on-1 with a seasoned traveler and want vacation planning done for you, go with a travel planner. If you want assistance planning your itinerary and seek to engage with a travel community, look at Travel-Wise. Travel-Wise strives to balance utilizing software-based automation and the interactions and community that personal trip planners can bring.