The Travel Agent Is Dead. Here's What Replaced It.
The travel agent as most people knew it — the person who booked your flights, found you a hotel, and handed you a printed folder — is gone. What replaced it is something harder to define and considerably harder to find: a travel designer.
A travel designer doesn't book trips. They architect experiences. The difference is the difference between a contractor and an architect. One executes the brief. The other shapes it.
I founded WHISK after a decade working across hospitality in San Francisco, Tokyo, Copenhagen, and France. In that time I've watched luxury travel quietly split into two categories: the kind you could have planned yourself, and the kind you couldn't have imagined without someone who lives inside the destination.
Most "luxury travel" falls into the first category. A beautiful hotel, an OpenTable reservation at a restaurant you found on Instagram, a driver booked through the hotel concierge. It checks the boxes. It doesn't make a story.
The second category — the trip that still comes up in conversation three years later — has almost nothing to do with the hotel brand and almost everything to do with access. The winemaker who opens a cellar that isn't on the estate's tour. The chef who cooks dinner in a farmhouse because someone made an introduction. The village no guidebook has found yet because the person who knew about it was sworn to silence.
That access doesn't come from a platform. It comes from a person who is actually there, actually embedded, actually known.
I'm based between Biarritz and Paris. I work across the French Basque Country, Burgundy, Champagne, and Paris with a small number of clients each season. Not because exclusivity is a brand strategy — because doing this kind of work well requires real bandwidth and real relationships, neither of which scale.
If you're planning a trip to France and you want the second kind of experience, WHISK designs private travel and on-the-ground concierge for travelers who care how a place feels, not just how it photographs.
Engagements begin at €5,000. Summer 2026 availability is limited. Inquire here.
—Maggie Spicer, WHISK
