Frequently asked questions

You could do this yourself with a free chatbot and a few hours of prompting, tab-juggling, and second-guessing. Our bet is that you don't want to — and that the checking is the actual work. A free model writes confident text and never confirms it, so you'd still be the one cross-referencing hours, closures, and whether a place is even open anymore. We do that part, stamp the date we did it, and hand you a finished plan. You're paying to get the hours back and to trust what's on the page.

Yes — that's who we built it for. You answer a short intake and hand the planning, the cross-checking, and the booking timeline to us. You arrive with the same energy as everyone else on the trip instead of running it like a tour guide. And when something's off, it's on us, not you — the person who planned it shouldn't be the one who takes the blame for a closed restaurant.

Every hotel, restaurant, and stop is researched against current sources and recent traveler video, then stamped with the date we looked — so you see each place as it is now, not as it read in 2019. When we can't stand behind something, we mark it and say so, rather than dressing up a guess.

The day is built around real movement: door-to-door transit times, the buffers between them, and the lead time on anything that sells out. We'll tell you the 6 PM viewpoint needs a 4:30 departure and that the museum books ten days ahead — the logistics a list of links leaves you to find out at the gate.

No. Handing you ten choices and making you decide is the work you were trying to avoid. We bring a point of view: safe routing at night, golden-hour timing, pacing that respects a travel day, and what the season does to crowds and closures. You can overrule any of it — you just start from a decision, not a menu.

A designed, dated document — hour by hour, with booking deadlines, door-to-door timing, and an alternate for every bookable stop. Something you hand to your trip, not a chat log you re-skim in line. You can read a real one start to finish on our sample page.

If a place we recommended has closed or changed by the time you travel, tell us any time from delivery through the end of your trip and we'll re-research that stop and send you a vetted replacement, at no charge. That covers defects — something wrong on our end. The remedy is always a replacement, not a refund.

You see the full price before any work begins, and that's the price. One flat fee per trip, by scope — no booking fees, no surcharges at the end, no upsell at checkout. We're not a booking platform, so there's nothing to bury.

No. We recommend a place because it's right for your trip, never because someone pays us to. We're paid by you, not by the hotels and restaurants we point you to — so the only thing we have to sell you is judgment.

Tell us, and we'll change it. Refining your itinerary until it fits is the point, not a metered extra — there's no revision counter and no per-change fee. Adjust the pace, swap a restaurant, rework a whole day; it's included. The only thing that costs more is genuinely new scope — adding a city or extending your dates — because that's a new piece of planning, and we'll quote it plainly before doing it.

No — we research, you book. We don't hold reservations or guarantee availability. Every recommendation comes with how to book it and how far ahead to do so. “Researched, not booked” is the honest line, and we mean it literally.

You'll get an email confirming we're on it within about 20 minutes of checkout, and the finished itinerary lands by the next morning.

We use what you tell us in the intake to build your itinerary — that's it. We don't sell your data, share it with the venues, or use it for ad targeting. If you opt in, we'll send occasional travel ideas; you can stop those any time, and they're separate from the emails about your actual trip. We're paid by you, not by them.

Most destinations a discerning traveler would choose. The quality of the plan tracks how much current, trustworthy information exists about a place — for major cities and well-traveled regions, that's deep; for genuinely remote spots, we'll tell you plainly where our confidence thins rather than dress up a guess.

A good travel designer does deep, personalized research and charges $2,000–$20,000 for it. We do the same discipline — bespoke, researched, validated, hour-by-hour — for a flat fee under $100, delivered in hours instead of weeks. The trade-off: we research and plan, we don't book on your behalf or staff a phone line during your trip. You get the planning brain, not the booking desk.

A high-end travel designer charges $2,000–$20,000 to plan a trip. Itinerist is a flat fee per trip: $19 for a single city, $49 for two or three, $79 for four or more. You see the full price before any work begins, and there are no booking fees, no commissions, and no surcharge at the end. The trade is straightforward: we do the research, the logistics, and the deciding; we don't book on your behalf or staff a phone line during your trip.

That's exactly what this is. You answer a short intake about how you travel, what you want ranked, and what you never want to see again, and we hand back a finished hour-by-hour itinerary with booking deadlines, door-to-door timing, and an alternate for every bookable stop. You don't brief a planner over three phone calls or wait two weeks. You don't open a chatbot and spend your evenings confirming opening hours. You answer a few questions and read the document the next morning.

Both, honestly. The research is done by a system we built and hold to a standard: every hotel, restaurant, and stop cross-referenced against current data and date-stamped, five biases applied to every trip — safety routing, golden-hour timing, real logistics, energy pacing, and what the season does to crowds and closures. What you receive reads like the work of a personal travel planner because that's the discipline it was built to match. What you pay reflects the fact that a machine does the checking at scale.

ChatGPT writes a plausible itinerary in seconds and confirms none of it. It doesn't know that the museum sells out ten days ahead, that the restaurant closed last spring, or that the 6 PM viewpoint needs a 4:30 departure. We do the checking, date-stamp the day we did it, mark anything we can't stand behind, and back the result: if a place has closed or changed by the time you travel, we re-research it and send a replacement free. You're not paying for the writing. You're paying for the checking, and for someone being accountable for it.

It's worth it if the checking is worth something to you. Free tools have made drafting an itinerary trivial and left the hard parts untouched: confirming what's open, sequencing the bookings that sell out, building the day around real transit times, and deciding instead of handing you ten options. That's several evenings of work, plus the closed restaurant and the sold-out tour you find out about on the ground. If you'd rather buy those evenings back and trust what's on the page, it's worth it. If you enjoy the planning, use a free tool with our blessing.

Custom, built from your intake every time. Nothing is assembled from a stock city guide. Your ranked priorities, your dates, your party, your dietary and mobility constraints, and the things you told us you never want to see all shape which places make the page and in what order. Two travelers asking for five days in Rome get two genuinely different documents, because the month, the pace, and the anniversary dinner at the center of it are different.

We don't book or guarantee reservations, we don't do budget-backpacker trips, and we don't resell a generic template — every itinerary is built from your intake. We're the planning and the checking, done once and handed over; we're not a 24/7 concierge or a booking agent.