Why Work With a Travel Advisor? The Answer for People Who Love Researching Their Own Trips
So you love planning your travels. Comparing hotels until you find the one, building a restaurant list before you've even booked your flight, mapping out the exact neighborhood you want to walk through on a Tuesday afternoon. Or maybe you're just good at it, with some parts of the process lighting you up...while others feel like homework you keep putting off.
If you are good at or love planning your trips, then why work with a travel advisor at all?
Here's my honest answer as a travel advisor of 10 years: I want you to keep doing what you love. I want you to keep having fun with the parts of trip planning you already enjoy. What I bring is everything around that: my own firsthand travel experience in the destinations you're considering, relationships with the best people on the ground once you get there, and someone taking care of every part of the process you don't enjoy as much, from start to finish.
Here's what that looks like in practice.
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Is a Travel Advisor Worth It If You Already Love Planning?
Working with a travel advisor opens up a world that most people don't have access to. That hotel you found on your own? I can potentially unlock upgrades and perks that are only available through an advisor. The food market you're already planning to visit? I might know a local chef who also leads tours there, the kind of experience you'd never stumble into on your own.
It's not that you can't plan a good trip on your own. It's that even a great researcher hits a wall the research alone can't solve.
That wall usually shows up on the bigger international trips. A two-week adventure honeymoon that should also feel stress-free. A multigenerational family trip where everyone has different travel styles. A complex international itinerary where every connection, reservation, and detail has to line up or else the whole trip could be thrown off.
I recently planned a trip for a family whose trip took them through Budapest and Salzburg before ending in Sardinia. A trip like this — three distinct destinations on one itinerary — requires more than just research. Something many travelers don't realize is how important sequencing is. Not only did each stop need to connect seamlessly into the next, but you want the feeling of the trip to make sense. That can impact what hotels you book, what activities you plan and when, and finally, how the end of the trip will feel. After sightseeing and discovery at the beginning, they ended in Sardinia, a place my client described this way: "It does not seem like Americans have found this place yet. I'd like to keep it my secret."
That's the kind of expertise a travel advisor can bring to complex international trips, multigenerational adventures, honeymoons, and more.
4 Ways a Travel Advisor Can Improve Your Trip Planning
1. Firsthand expertise from my own travels
I have traveled to over thirty countries, and every year I visit at least one new destination to personally scope out for my clients. Knowing firsthand what a hotel or a destination actually feels like is the expertise a travel advisor brings to your trip.
These insights help me make more personalized recommendations, like when I took what I knew about a family I've worked with for years and suggested a destination completely off their radar for their annual summer trip: Montenegro. This family takes an annual multigenerational trip together, parents, adult children, and partners, all in one group. The parents wanted history, culture, and meaningful culinary experiences. Their adult kids wanted a livelier pace with the freedom to explore on their own. Montenegro delivered on both, confirmed by their welcome-home feedback: "We had an amazing trip! The hotels were stunning! The meals at each were just next level — that is so important to us. Honestly, the experience was so much more than we expected."
2. Relationships with top service providers in destination
When most people plan a trip, they identify the experiences they want. Maybe a food tour, a visit to the iconic landmarks, some museums. They'll scour Airbnb Experiences or Viator to find the best-reviewed activities. And much of the time, this works.
So how does a travel advisor choose tour guides and source experiences? We have relationships with destination management companies (DMCs), local companies that often work exclusively with travel advisors. These DMCs are usually staffed by some of the best tourism professionals in the area, with deep, niche expertise, and they can unlock experiences that you can't. Tours with private art preservationists. Dinners with chefs. Wine tastings that aren't on the website. Landmark visits that take you to passageways and rooms otherwise restricted to visitors. The list goes on.
I have spent years curating these relationships and have my most trusted DMCs around the world, so that when you come to me with a dream, I can make it happen.
3. Makes the hotel more than a place to sleep
Some of my clients absolutely love finding the hotels for their trips. When they come to me to start planning, they send over what they found, knowing that I'll work my magic to find any perks and upgrades available to travel advisors. They did the fun part, finding the property. Then they hand over the less fun bit: making the reservation, deciding between rooms, the confirmations, all of it.
Depending on the property, some of the value travel advisors bring to a hotel booking can include:
A welcome amenity already waiting in your room before you've unpacked
A confirmed room upgrade instead of a wait-and-see request at the front desk
An on-property credit toward dinner or a spa treatment
Someone already in touch with the hotel before you arrive, so your dates, requests, and any special occasion are known before you check in
The rate doesn't change. The experience does.
4. Handling what you don't enjoy
There are the fun parts of planning a trip, then there are the parts that feel like a chore. You do what you love, and I'll take care of the rest: the logistics, confirmation calls, handling delays, and catching issues before you even know they're a problem.
8 Things a Travel Advisor Does That You Can't (or Don't Want To)
You keep doing what you love when planning a trip, but give me everything else. Here's what that actually looks like, and why planning a trip with a travel advisor is worth it:
Tracking every flight for changes before you even leave home
Managing disruptions in real time if something shifts while you're already traveling
Coordinating every transfer between stops, planes, trains, and cars, so nothing is left disconnected
Building the pacing of each day so the trip doesn't wear you out before it's over
Auditing every confirmation and every ticket so nothing slips through
Keeping emergency contact information on file in case anything happens on the ground
Sorting the small logistics, like whether your guide meets you at the hotel or a five-minute walk away, and whether you need a ticket ahead of time for something you're visiting on your own
Helping you align your trip around your interests, travel styles, and the purpose of your trip, turning a list of activities into experiences that feel tailored to you
That list is only the surface of what a good travel advisor is doing in the background while you're doing the parts of planning you love.
Why Not Just Book It Yourself on Amex or a Travel Platform?
You can, and for a simple trip, that might be all you need. Amex and booking platforms are built to book a reservation, not to know you. They can't tell you the Montenegro hotel that photographs beautifully is actually noisy on weekends, or that a specific guide in Lisbon is worth requesting by name. Booking through a card or a platform gets you a room. Working with someone who has stayed there, and knows how you like to travel, gets you the right room, at the right moment in your trip.
Keep What You Love. Hand Me the Rest.
Working with a travel advisor was never about giving up the planning you love. It's about being honest with yourself about which parts of the process are actually fun and which ones feel like a chore...and handing over only the second half.
If you're planning something with real complexity, a multigenerational trip, a multi-country itinerary, or simply a vacation you want done well without doing it all yourself, tell me what you want to keep. I'll show you exactly what I'd take off your plate.
Whitney Shindelar
Undiscovered Sunsets was a long time in the making, even if I myself didn’t realize it. During my time at the University of Northern Iowa, I studied abroad in New Zealand. Upon graduating, I bought a one-way ticket to France, lived with a French family and studied with classmates from Turkey, China, Russia, Germany, Italy, and everywhere in between. In 2010 I began teaching English as a foreign language. This job quickly took me to China, where English teachers were in high demand and within three years, I began working in a 5-star hotel, speaking Mandarin throughout most of my day. In total, I lived abroad for 7 years.
I consider Undiscovered Sunsets to be the perfect mélange of my personal experience traveling the world and my professional experience working in the hospitality industry.
I look forward to designing your next adventure!
