Be excellent to each other

Seth Godin published a short post called Hospitality in the mirror. His point: the people who get the most generous, most memorable hospitality are usually the ones who show up ready for it, ie give kindness. Entitlement shuts it down. His example is Halloween. Hand a kid a piece of candy and the exchange is over. The kid in the great costume, the one who says something that makes you laugh, is the one you remember next year.

We have been building complex trips since 1987, and we recognized ourselves on both sides of that post. Being excellent to our customers, and also - understanding that not all who ask to work with us, are a good fit.

What it looks like from our desk

A round the world ticket or a 10-stop itinerary is not something you pick off a shelf at 7-11. Our algorithm and a team of human builds it with you, usually over several iterations. Routing, fare rules, alliance limits, visa timing and connection risk all have to line up, and every one of them involves a trade-off that only you can decide. Not to mention that subtle parts of a trip of "Why are you going?" and "How do you want to feel during and after."

So the trip you end up with depends a lot on what you bring to the first conversation and as you interact with TripPlanner. Our consultants will tell you, without much prompting, that the travelers they remember are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones who made the work interesting via being open, sharing and listening.

What great travelers bring

None of this is about being polite for its own sake. Each of these makes your trip better, in ways you will notice on the road.

The why, not just the where. "Tokyo, Bangkok, Istanbul, Lisbon" is a list. "We're celebrating 30 years and my wife has wanted to see the temples in Kyoto since she was a kid" is a brief. The second one tells your consultant to protect the Kyoto days at all costs and to bend everything else around them.

What is fixed and what is soft. Every trip has hard edges: a wedding in Melbourne, a school term, a work contract. Everything else can usually move. When you tell us which is which, we can shift a soft date by two days to save a few hundred dollars or skip an overnight connection. When everything is "fixed," we lose most of our room to help.

A real budget. A number lets us show you the best trip at that price, plus what the next step up would buy. "As cheap as possible" gets you the cheapest routing, which is rarely the one you want once you see the layovers. Bullying our chat bots or our human agents because a customer wants the cheapest price no matter what - Off to Kayak or Google Flights you go. Not a good fit for AirTreks. We are looking for Win-Win and good feelings about each other too.

Your passport and visa situation, early. This is the one that bites. A ticket can be perfect and still fail if a visa is not ready in time. One family's 11-month trip went through 14 versions over six months, and a good share of that rework traced back to visas that were not ready when the dates came up. Tell us your nationality and anything unusual up front, and we will flag the timelines before you commit. For every country on your route, our travel requirements page links the official visa, entry and health sources.

Quick answers and honest feedback. Fares change by the minute today. A seat that is available today may not be 15 minutes from now or on Thursday. If an option does not feel right, say so and say why. "Too many early starts" is enough for Tilly or our team to rebuild it. Silence leaves us guessing.

A word when something changes on your end. Plans shift on long trips. The traveler who emails "we want to stay in Vietnam an extra week, what are our options?" before the flight, rather than after the no-show, keeps every option open. Under most multi-stop fare rules, a skipped flight will cancel the rest of the ticket. A heads-up costs nothing.

Our side of the mirror

Godin's post is mostly addressed to customers, but the mirror works both ways. If you bring all of that, you deserve a consultant who meets it: someone who explains the trade-off instead of hiding it, tells you about the schedule change before you find it, and says "this saves $400 but adds six hours in Doha" instead of quietly picking the cheap one.

That is a big part of our job. A solution that meets what you are optimizing for and a team who takes it seriously is how a complicated trip turns into the one you hoped for.

Godin ends by saying that trying to be the best customer of the day is its own reward. On a multi-stop trip, the reward is also very practical: better routing, fewer surprises, and when a customer talks to us, yes, talk as in on phone or zoom, we can often understand things that are just missed via digital communication of 1's and 0's.

Ready to start? Tell us where you want to go, and why. Start your trip in TripPlanner or talk to a consultant.