Anyone Can Be A Specialist…

Today I’m answering a very important question from one of our listeners, Michael, who asks — what really is the difference between a travel agent and a travel designer? Now, if you’ve been on our site, Kated.com, you’ll see that what we do is, we connect travellers directly to local travel designers.

And Michael is quite right in his question, what is the difference between a local travel designer and a travel agent? And to answer that, I want to preface it with something I think is very common in today’s world, and that everyone and anyone can call themselves whatever they want to be. Anyone can be an expert. Anyone can be a specialist, anyone can claim to be the best.

…Or Can They?

So what does that mean? Who is an expert, who is a specialist? And the difference between a travel agent and a travel designer is not that one is an expert and the other is not, they are both experts in their fields.

The difference is that a travel agent is based in the country where you are travelling from. A travel agent is based where you are and a travel agent has visited the place that you want to visit. So that travel agent can offer you recommendations, can offer you advice, can create a trip for you based on their understanding of the destination. I mean, they’ve been there, right? So they can help to design and create your trip.

Now, a local travel designer hasn’t been there — a local travel designer lives there. So that travel designer hasn’t visited a few times. Hasn’t visited ten times. He or she is there every single day. He or she has been organizing and creating trips to the place where they live for years.

There Is No Specialist For Africa

And you can see more of this difference, if you ask a travel agent and a travel designer their specialisms. If you ask a travel agent, a travel agent might be, “I’m the specialist in my company for Asia”, or “I’m the specialist for the Americas”, or “I’m the specialist for Italy”. If you ask a travel designer in Italy, they won’t be a specialist for Italy. They’ll be a specialist for Tuscany because they’re from Tuscany. And they host people in Tuscany all the time.

A travel designer won’t be an expert for Africa. I mean, it’s a huge continent, 54 different countries, 250 or more different languages. A travel designer will be an expert for a South African safari, for visiting the Maasai Mara — that’s in Kenya — for Uganda. We have one in there, Samuel, who is a travel specialist for South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Two very remote regions, where very few people travel to.

And he is able to create those trips because he lives in the region and he’s going there all the time. So, the situation is always changing, it can be dangerous there, and he knows about it because he’s there. He’s not finding out about it later.

You Speak Directly To Your Host

This idea of specialism really comes to the fore when you’re planning a trip. With a travel agent, a travel agent can give you advice, they can talk you through what they experienced, and can give you some recommendations. And a travel agent can create your itinerary, you book the itinerary. Ultimately it’s not the travel agent who’s going to take you on that trip.

The travel agent isn’t going to be your host, the travel agent isn’t going to be the person guiding you through whatever country you are going to. The travel agent will book the trip and then pass you on to their local supplier, their local provider in the destination. So what happens is, your request becomes diluted because you cannot speak directly to the person who’s going to provide your trip.

At the same time, the travel agent does their job and collects their commission on top of providing the business to the local travel provider.

Now imagine, instead of going through the intermediary, you go direct to the person who is going to host you and deliver your trip. So instead of saying to the travel agent, “we want to do this and this”, you say directly to the travel designer who is in the country and you tell them, “this is exactly what I want to do”.

And of course the travel designer knows more options and knows really what is possible because they live there. And they’re not a specialist organizing trips to 20, 30 different countries. They’re a specialist hosting people and organizing similar trips in the place that you are going to.

They Will Create A Trip Custom-Made For You

So with the travel designer, there’s a lot bigger scope for possibility, because you can communicate directly. Now, forgetting about the extra cost of the commission that’s added on to the estate agent — forget about that. A really important thing for us at Kated is the authenticity of what you’re able to do. By communicating directly with a travel designer, it’s much easier to get something in line with what you really want from a trip. You’re not forced into a set series of products here — “you could do A, B or C” — with a travel designer, it’s “okay. We’ll create something for you, based on what you want to do”.

And then how good does it feel when you create this trip, this really dream trip, with somebody? And you set off, and the person who created it for you is the person who welcomes and hosts you when you arrive. And there again is the big difference. A travel agent is based in the place you are travelling from. Their responsibility goes as soon as you get on the plane and leave.

The travel designer is based in the place you are travelling to. So creating the trip is just a start. It gets really good when you arrive. You’ve had some communication before, the travel designer knows something about you, knows exactly what you want, what you want to do, and then is able to host you in the place they call home.