How we route a new trip
The four questions we ask before a destination becomes a published tour, and the two weeks we spend answering them.
We get asked, often, how a route ends up on the calendar. The honest answer is that a new trip starts not with a map but with four questions, asked in this order, over the course of about two weeks.
The first question: would we send a friend?
Every trip begins as a route one of our guides already loves. Before we look at season or price, the lead guide has to answer a single question: would you send a close friend on this route, at this pace, in this season? If the answer is anything other than an immediate yes, the route goes no further.
The second question: what is the morning like?
A route lives or dies on its mornings. We walk every proposed itinerary at least twice in different seasons before it is published, and we pay close attention to the first two hours of each day. A morning that fights you — a long transfer, a scramble for breakfast, a misleading start — sets the tone for the whole trip.
The third question: what do we leave out?
The temptation, with a new route, is to add. We do the opposite. After the first scouting run we cut at least one day’s worth of activity. The Patagonia itinerary, for instance, originally had nine walking days. It now has eight, plus a buffer day. The buffer is the point.
The fourth question: who leads it?
A route is not published until a named guide has signed off on it. The Dolomites traverse is Marta’s and Thomas’s; the Kyoto route is Sayuri’s. The name on the departure calendar is the person who will walk it with you.
What we do not ask
We do not ask whether the route will sell out. We do not ask whether it photographs well for the website. We do not ask whether it is the kind of thing that trends on a travel feed. Those questions answer themselves, or they do not, and either way they are not the questions that make a trip worth taking.