What a trip designer actually does all day
Ines has designed 214 trips and hosted 31. We asked her to walk through one ordinary Tuesday, hour by hour.
"The first hour is always other people's emergencies," Ines says. "Someone's flight moved, someone's passport is at a visa office, someone read something about a volcano."
Then briefs. A new brief takes her about ninety minutes of real thinking, most of it spent working out what the traveller has not said. "People write down where they want to go. They almost never write down how they want to feel on day four. That's the actual brief."
“The permit buys you a morning. Everything else you do buys you the odds that the morning is the one you'll talk about for ten years.”
Afternoons are supplier calls, in three time zones, mostly about things going slightly wrong. "A good designer's value is not the itinerary. It's that when the boat doesn't show up, somebody already has the phone number of a second boat."
She hosts three or four group departures a year. "You cannot design a place you have not walked. I go back every year, and every year I change something."
Writes for The Passage about the parts of a trip that don't fit in a brochure. Available to design yours.