06/10/2026
HOW DO YOU CHOOSE A TRAVEL ADVISOR?
Okay, you’ve decided to use a travel advisor. You want to take hours of research off your plate, have a professional design your trip, and know that someone has your back along the way.
So… how do you choose the RIGHT travel advisor?
Here are a few things I would look for:
1. They invest in their education.
Travel changes constantly. Your advisor should be attending conferences, meeting with hotels, participating in trainings, doing hotel site inspections and continually growing their destination knowledge.
No advisor can personally know every hotel in every country. But a great advisor knows how to access the people who do.
2. Experience matters—and ask about trip volume.
Years in business don’t always tell the whole story. Someone could technically have been an advisor for years but only book a handful of trips annually. Annual sales volume can give you a better sense of how active and experienced they really are.
I would look for an advisor booking at least $500,000 in travel annually. Many successful, experienced advisors are booking $1–2 million every year. If that makes you uncomfortable, ask how many trips they’ve planned. For reference, I plan about 90 a year and that’s on the high end for the industry.
Why does that matter? Because volume creates experience. They’ve navigated complicated logistics, developed strong supplier relationships and handled situations when things didn’t go according to plan.
Your vacation shouldn’t be someone’s practice run.
3. Look at their professional affiliations.
This one may be controversial, but I believe being affiliated with Virtuoso adds another layer of professional vetting.
There are absolutely excellent advisors who are not Virtuoso advisors, so absolutely do not rule them out. But if you consider yourself a luxury traveler, Virtuoso is a highly respected global luxury travel network who gives you special access to established advisors and preferred travel programs and perks. There are other affiliations that fit perfectly for other types of travel with their own perks. Look into their differences.
For a consumer who doesn’t know much about the travel industry, professional affiliations are one more way to help vet the person you’re trusting with your trip.
4. Make sure they’re running a business.
Do they have an established business with reviews? An LLC? Professional E&O insurance? Contracts and terms and conditions? Project-management and itinerary technology? Established processes for payments, documentation and communication? Are they full-time?
These things aren’t glamorous, but they matter.
You’re trusting someone with tens of thousands of dollars of your hard-earned money and something more valuable: time with those you love.
Look for someone who treats travel advising as a profession and runs their business accordingly.
5. Don’t be afraid of a planning fee.
In fact, I would expect a professional to charge one.
Your travel advisor as another member of your professional team, like your accountant, financial advisor, or attorney. You hire those professionals because their expertise saves you time, helps you make better decisions, and protects your investment. With the amount you invest in travel, it should be viewed the same way.
A planning fee compensates an advisor for the expertise, research, itinerary design, supplier coordination, and time that goes into creating your trip. But it also serves another important purpose: it allows us to focus on clients who are invested.
Without a fee, advisors can spend hours preparing quotes and researching trips for people who are shopping around. Charging a professional fee ensures their time is dedicated to serious clients who have committed to working with them.
That means their time and attention are being reserved for a smaller group of invested clients — you.
Saving a couple hundred dollars at the beginning isn’t necessarily a savings in the end. When it comes to expert travel planning, sometimes you really do get what you pay for.
6. Choose someone who specializes in the way YOU travel.
Someone who primarily books cruises may not be the best person to design a complicated three-country European itinerary. An advisor specializing in honeymoons may not be the right fit for a multigenerational family of 12.
Ask whether they regularly plan your type of trip at your approximate budget level.
7. Finally, make sure you actually LIKE and TRUST them.
Your travel advisor is going to learn a lot about you—how you spend your money, what your family enjoys, what drives you crazy, how much downtime you need, whether you want Michelin stars or the little neighborhood restaurant nobody knows about.
The best advisor/client relationships can last for years.
Credentials matter. Experience matters. Sales volume matters. Relationships matter. Professionalism matters.
But fit matters, too.
And one last thing: You absolutely do not have to choose me as your travel advisor.
My goal of this post is to help you understand what to look for so you can find the advisor who is the perfect fit for you—someone with the experience, professionalism, connections and expertise to take great care of both your investment and your time.
There are wonderful travel advisors out there. You are trusting them with thousands. Ask the right questions, do a little vetting and choose the professional you trust to be part of your team.
Because the right travel advisor can make all the difference.
