Working with Aster Travel Design takes five steps and about as much of your time as two short calls. Here is the whole process, from the first conversation to the week you come home. Nothing is outsourced and no scripted hotline answers the phone: the designer who writes your itinerary is the person you hear from on the road.
The process
- Discovery call, twenty minutes. We talk through what the trip is for, your dates, who is coming, what you have spent before and what went wrong on past journeys. If we are not the right studio for it, we say so on this call rather than after you pay.
- Design. Within a week you get a draft route with the reasoning written next to each day: why this base, why this night here and not there. You reply with changes, we revise once or twice, and the fee of $250 for new custom trips is invoiced when design begins.
- Booking. You approve the route and we hold space, place deposits, send confirmations, and check every traveler name against the passport exactly as it will be read at check-in.
- Pre-trip brief, two to three weeks before departure. One packet with confirmations, transfer contacts, addresses in local format, opening hours, and what to have ready without a signal. Print the packet or keep it on your phone; both work when you are offline.
- Support on the road. You reach the person who wrote your itinerary and holds every confirmation, not a call center. When a flight cancels we rebuild the connections and rebook them while you are still standing at the counter.
You can stop at the end of any step. Some travelers take the draft and run with it, and we would rather that happen quietly than watch a plan they do not love get booked. If you want to keep part of the booking yourself, say so at the design stage and we will mark which pieces are safe to split and which are not.