Planning ‘The Trip’- Phase II: Finding Some Help

To take up where the Phase I post left off, we will need to flash back to July of 2006. It was at that time that we had decided to seek help and were just getting started on considering who we might want to have as our travel agent. We would need someone that could work up an around-the-world itinerary and who also had some expertise with things that would cater to the kids. We thought that we ought to make a list of agents to contact, starting first with agents we already knew, then ones in the local area (via the phone book and the web), then adding any possibilities based on input from friends and co-workers.

Susan has been a long-time subscriber to Condé Nast Traveler and it was while I was flipping through one of the issues that listed the year’s best travel agents that I came upon an entry for a particular agent that said something along the lines of,

“…(Agent's name) is a specialist in around-the world-itineraries and in travels involving children.” This particular agent was also located in Atlanta.

Well… I guess that’s sorta what we were looking for!

We didn’t think that searching any further would yield anyone who could seemingly better fit the needs we had, so we decided then and there to give her a call to see if she was taking new clients. She was and we have been a client of hers ever since.

Our initial communications were centered on introductions, passports, fee schedules and that sort of thing. Then we started getting down to the nitty gritty… we gave her a ‘hit list’ of everywhere we wanted to go with the design of cutting it down right away to fit into the timeframe we had established. We have been continually modifying that list over the past year taking into account, among many other things, airline schedules, availability of specific tour dates and changes in our preferences.

We are now working on the fifth mutation of the original itinerary and I will cover the basics of it and the changes it has undergone in more detail in a future post. I think I’ll call it something clever… like, “The Itinerary.”