Travel designers and concierges

A travel designer’s product is a promise about the future, and a client can only judge it by the way the promise was made. The enquiry is the whole showroom: how fast an answer came, what it asked before it suggested anything, and whether it read as written to this person or assembled from a shelf.

Then the proposal, which has to do two contradictory things at once — prove real expertise, and be easy to say yes to — and most fail at one or the other. What was suggested, what was deliberately not, what price sat against what, and whether the questions the client actually asked were answered anywhere in it.

And then the trip happens somewhere else, run by other people, and every one of their failures is yours. The service on the ground — the number answered on a Sunday, the change made without drama, the follow-up on return — is what a client paid the difference for, and it is the only part they will describe to anybody afterwards.

• Designers and concierges whose enquiries are answered by several consultants working to no shared standard.
• Anyone whose proposals convert less often than the quality of the work should allow.
• Businesses whose reputation rests entirely on how they behave when a trip goes wrong.

• What the first response told a client about how they were going to be handled.
• How the proposal read to somebody holding two others alongside it.
• What happened when something needed changing, and who had to chase whom.
• What a client said about the service three days after coming home.