Five full stars. We love love love our travel agent Aimee! Aimee has helped us plan multiple trips…read morenow that range from full-service where every last detail is thought of and planned to less managed trips where you just need hotels and a few tours and book everything else on your own and she shines in every way.
On our full-service trips to Scandinavia and Japan, she took care of every detail from when we got off the plane with a private driver taking you to our first hotel, dinner reservations, private sushi classes, food tours, cultural heritage site tours, transfers between cities and hotels, to when we left our last hotel and go home (in style of course!). We have been privileged to have unique experiences such as riding a bike through Copenhagen with a private chef with a kitchen-bike, to learning how to make sushi with a sushi chef, to private city tours of Stockholm, Kayaking in the Lulea River in Sweden, taking a rigid inflatable speedboat to a Fjord in the Norwegian arctic circle, and touring the most beautiful temples and shrines of Japan with a private guide who can share details and educate you on the history and the culture that you could not find on your own.
Travel agents make money when they book you things, but Aimee is never pushy with booking something every single day, and gives you time to decompress and discover on your own if you so choose. (If you want to do something planned every day you definitely can!)
While our experiences are not the cheapest (The Four Seasons is always so expensive!) , our vacation time is limited, and we appreciate how we get a full experience of a city / country / culture and make the best use of that one resource that none of us have unlimited amounts of -- time. We also feel like even though the expense is high that we are getting decent value for our hard-earned money. We were with a different travel agency previously who we felt like did not provide as much value for our money and are happy we switched to Avant Garde.
When a snag happens on a trip, like the plane delay that got us to Copenhagen 3.5 hours late last summer, Aimee or someone on her team from SD or Denmark jump into action and make sure that we reconnect with the trip and get back on track as soon as possible. We have declined some of her choices for hotels and had her book a hotel that we heard about or read about, and she has never given us any trouble or made us feel like she was pushing us to have to stay at any property that was more advantageous for her business. Her focus is to design a trip that YOU want to take, and we really, really feel like she is in our best interest all of the time.
We've also booked less-managed trips with Aimee, where she helps us with hotels and maybe a couple of things in cities we understand and know. A memorable trip we took last year was when we went to Paris and Madrid to see Taylor Swift. We didn't want or need (or necessarily have the budget for) a full-service trip with action-packed private tours but she was happy to book our hotels, provide recommendations on what to do, and let us book other things on our own.
From what I understand, Aimee has a team of professionals that work with her who help coordinate and plan and cater to many price points, but she specifically specializes in high-end travel with unique experiences. I love the fact that she always does a post-trip call (our previous high-end travel agent didn't do this) and wants to know what we loved (almost everything) and what can be improved (a few things) and feel like she really cares about your experience and uses the feedback to help us plan our next fabulous vacation and to avoid pitfalls that prior clients maybe have experienced.
We are already dreaming of our next trip (with Aimee's help, of course!) and would highly recommend her for anybody who wants a customized, high-end experience (with prices to match!) that provide a good value for money spent.
