The art of a good brief

Begin with the occasion

Every journey has a reason, and the reason is the best brief there is. A fortieth birthday, three generations travelling together for the first time, a year that has been demanding enough to deserve a fortnight of late starts: each of these asks for a different rhythm, and knowing which one we are serving tells us where to spend and where to keep things simple. An anniversary might hang on a single dinner and a room with the right view. A family might need a pool more than a museum.

Tell us why you are going and which moments must not go wrong. Everything else in the itinerary is arranged in service of those, and the arranging is our business.

Describe a day you loved

The most useful thing a traveller can give us is not an adjective but an example. In Japan, the difference between a morning spent moving between design shops with a guide and a morning spent in one garden with nobody at all is the difference between two entirely different itineraries, and only you know which morning is yours. Tell us about the hotel you would go back to tomorrow and the one you would not, and say why. Tell us about the dinner you still think about.

A word such as luxury tells us very little; a remembered evening tells us how you like to be looked after. From those particulars we choose the rooms, the guide, the counter and the ryokan with a precision no questionnaire can reach.

The practical brief, made plain

Then the particulars that let us act: the dates, or the months that could work; who is travelling and how the rooms should be arranged; a budget you are comfortable with and what it must cover, so that the proposal is built to it rather than around it; dietary requirements, the amount of walking that feels like pleasure rather than effort and any date on the calendar that cannot move.

Keep sensitive medical detail out of the first web form; an outline is enough for us to agree a more private way of discussing anything that needs it. The rest can be as brief as you like. We would rather have six honest lines than a page of hedged ones.

Tell us where to surprise you

The best briefs also say what is not settled. You may have a firm view on the hotel and an open mind about everything else, or know a country well and want the house to take the rest off your hands. Tell us which decisions are yours and which are invitations. Then we can bring you a few real choices, explain what each does to the shape of the trip and develop the one you warm to.

That is where the conversation earns its keep. A brief is not a form to be completed but the beginning of an exchange, and the journeys people remember longest are usually the ones in which they were asked one more question than they expected.