Three designers run Aster Travel Design, each with a corner of the map they know best. Every itinerary is written by the designer you meet on the first call and stays with that person through the trip, so you never explain your plans twice.
Marisa Okafor - Founder and Lead Travel Designer
Marisa founded Aster Travel Design and leads its design work. She spent eleven years in travel operations before opening the studio, most of it coordinating multi-country itineraries for operators moving thousands of people a season, and that background shows in every proposal she sends: a printed itinerary in the packet, a hotel district walked before it is recommended, and a six-hour layover treated as a design problem rather than a gamble. She handles complex routing, long-haul connections and the trade-offs that keep a route sane when a season shifts. Clients arrive with a folder of ideas and leave with three options and a reason behind each one.
Theo Lindqvist - Europe and River Cruises
Theo designs Europe itineraries and river cruises. He is Swedish-American, based in Portland, and spent three years planning port days for river-cruise lines before joining the studio, which means he reads timetables the way other people read novels. He will tell you which deck cabins are worth the upgrade, which canal loops repeat the same forty minutes of scenery, and how long the walk from the pier to the old town really takes. His days tend to run dense: early trains, short hops, an extra night wherever the connection would otherwise be tight. The detail group travelers most often get wrong is transfer time on arrival day, and he plans around it.
Dana Whitfield - Family and Multigenerational Travel
Dana designs family and multigenerational trips, the kind with six to twelve people, two grandparents and a nap schedule. She checks playground-to-museum walking distances herself, books the room with a second bathroom first, and builds days around the four o'clock energy crash instead of pretending it does not happen. Her proposals name ages, meal logistics and queue times, and she will say out loud when a plan is too full for the youngest traveler in the group. Every trip she sends carries one honest downside written down in advance, so nobody meets a hill, a ferry or a two-hour transfer for the first time on day three.
Two more consultants work behind the scenes on quotes, documents and supplier follow-up. They do not carry client files of their own, which keeps the paperwork moving while you are in transit and leaves your designer focused on the route.