Such a long and complex trip would not have been possible without the help of a truly professional travel agent. Had we endeavored to organize it ourselves, it would have taken us over a year, and we would have made many mistakes which would have resulted in wasted time and money, but more importantly in us missing exciting places/things.
The criteria
for choosing our travel agent were:
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A network of local operators in all the countries we wanted to visit, |
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A real knowledge of all these places, but above all |
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A clear willingness and ability to design this trip specifically for us, taking into account our goals, desires and interests. |
Indeed, you can find several agencies with the proper network of operators and a good knowledge. They however tend to want to sell you pre-packaged tours, and their willingness to customize the trip is limited, because it translates into a significant amount of additional work for them. Even the leader A&K will only grant you a mere 10 minutes each with their European, African and Asian experts on the phone. Hardly what we were expecting from a high end travel agency.
After carefully interviewing several travel agencies, we reached the conclusion that only one of them would bring us the three key dimensions we needed. We selected the services of R. Crusoe & Son.
They did an outstanding job of working with us for numerous hours to design the trip (including several iterations on a 35-page long itinerary), then throughout the trip took care of the fastidious job of coordinating, organizing, synchronizing so that at every step, a local operator with proper briefing on what we were interested in was there to greet us, and help us discover their country. During the whole trip, R. Crusoe was available on a simple phone call should we need to reach them.
The travel agent's knowledge was crucial in our situation, as probably in many others: indeed, if we knew everything about the places we are going to visit, we probably wouldn't feel the need to visit them in the first place, would we? At some point, you need to decide that the travel agent understands what you want to accomplish and knows the places, and let him make decisions. Looking back on this trip, there is very little we would change knowing what we know now...
Flexibility is an additional key dimension we discovered during our trip. How can you possibly before the trip know that you won't want to change something while you are under way (say, stay an additional day somewhere, or skip another place all together)? Some agents tell you point blank that it is not an option, or that the cost will be very high. All it took with R. Crusoe & Son was a phone call (not that we had to do it often, the trip was really extremely well suited to our goals and needs).
A big challenge when traveling for such an extended period of time is getting your mail. Again, R. Crusoe & Son did a great job at helping our friends and business relations to find out how to most effectively reach us. They also tracked down lost packages, and helped us get all our mail.