Why We Travel Differently

The Story Behind Tourism Artisans, Spain Private Guides and TravelerSe

by Pamela Giacaman.

How years of guiding, travelling and designing journeys taught us that the best itineraries are not found in a search engine — they are built around people.

There is a moment in every journey when a traveller stops being a tourist.

It might happen while sitting at a small table in a village nobody recommended on Instagram. It might happen while listening to a local guide explain a historical event that suddenly makes sense of everything you have been seeing. Or it might happen on a quiet road between two famous destinations, when the landscape outside the window becomes more memorable than the attraction you were originally heading towards.

These moments are rarely the ones you find by searching for “the top 10 things to do”.

And that is precisely where our story begins.

We are Tourism Artisans, Spain Private Guides and, more recently, TravelerSe.

For years, we have been designing journeys, guiding travellers, exploring destinations and, perhaps most importantly, travelling ourselves. We have visited places that exceeded every expectation and others that left us wondering why anyone had told us they were unmissable.

We have taken the wrong road — sometimes literally and sometimes metaphorically. We have discovered wonderful places by accident. We have returned to places we thought we knew and seen them differently. We have eaten unforgettable meals and, occasionally, rather forgettable ones.

We have met extraordinary locals, worked with brilliant guides and drivers, and learned that the difference between a good travel experience and an exceptional one often lies in details.

Over time, all of this led us to a rather simple conclusion:

Travelling well is not about seeing more. It is about choosing better.

Oddly enough, this story began at a time when none of us could travel.

During the COVID pandemic, Dolça and I met online after we both became members of an exclusive association of private guides from across Europe. Like everyone else in the travel world, we were longing to travel again.

It is funny how much we appreciate something once we cannot have it.

While waiting for the world to open again, we started talking, sharing ideas and, eventually, dreaming about a better and more responsible way of travelling.

We were both guides, both travellers, and both deeply connected to the places where we lived and worked. And we began wondering whether there was a way to use all that knowledge for a common purpose.

Not simply to show people places, but to help them make better decisions about where to go, how long to stay, what was actually worth their time — and, occasionally, what they could happily skip.

Our first venture into this way of working was Spain Private Guides, created from a very personal relationship with Spain.

The idea was never simply to create another website selling guided tours.

We wanted to offer something more personal: a way of helping travellers experience Spain through people who actually know the country.

That meant working with excellent local guides, arranging transportation when needed, recommending places to visit, helping travellers understand how much time they should really spend in a destination, and — perhaps most importantly — knowing when not to follow the obvious route.

Spain is a perfect example of why this matters.

You can easily find a list of the ten most beautiful towns in Spain. You can find the best museums, the most famous wineries, the most photographed restaurants, and the monuments you absolutely “must” see.

But a list cannot tell you whether a particular destination makes sense for you.

It cannot know that you love architecture but have little patience for large crowds. It cannot know that you would happily spend three hours discussing Roman history but would rather skip the third cathedral of your trip. It cannot know that your idea of a perfect afternoon is a long lunch followed by a walk through a small town, while your travelling companion would rather visit a contemporary art museum.

And it certainly cannot know that after four consecutive days of intensive sightseeing, what you actually need is a slow morning and a very good coffee.

We can, because we have been there.

Over the years, our work began to evolve.

We were no longer simply being asked, “Can you arrange a private tour in Barcelona?”

People started asking us much bigger questions.

Where should we go? How many nights should we spend in each place? Should we visit Córdoba or spend more time in Cádiz? Is it worth renting a car, or would the train be better? Should we stay in San Sebastián or Bilbao? Can we combine La Rioja with the Basque Country? What is the best way to see Andalusia without spending half the holiday inside a car?

And then there were the questions that became increasingly interesting to us: Which winery is actually worth visiting? Where should we stop for lunch? Is this museum really worth two hours of our time?

Sometimes the most important question of all: “If you were doing this trip yourself, what would you do?” 

And that question changed everything.

It is one thing to sell a tour. It is another thing entirely to put your own experience behind a recommendation.

When someone asks us what we would do, we cannot simply open a database and compare ratings. We have to think. We have to remember. We have to draw on years of experience, personal preferences, local knowledge, mistakes, discoveries and conversations.

And that is when we realised that what many travellers were looking for was not another catalogue of services.

They were looking for deep knowledge and experience.

Someone who could look at all the possibilities and say:

“Don’t do that. It sounds wonderful, but it doesn’t make sense with the rest of your trip.”

Or: “Yes. Absolutely. If you have the time, I would go there.”

That kind of advice is enormously valuable. And it is deeply personal.

The travel industry loves the words “perfect” and “authentic”.

Perfect itinerary. Authentic destination. Perfect hotel. Perfect restaurant. Authentic experience.

We are rather suspicious of these words.

There is no perfect itinerary and no authentic destination. There is only an itinerary that is right for a particular person, at a particular moment, travelling in a particular way.

A couple celebrating an anniversary does not travel like a family with two teenagers. Someone visiting Spain for the first time does not need the same itinerary as someone returning for the fifth time.

A passionate wine lover might happily spend more than an entire day in Rioja. Someone who is not particularly interested in wine probably should not.

A traveller fascinated by history might want to visit places that another person would find unbearably obscure.

And someone who has spent six months planning their trip may need very little help — except for those complicated parts where local knowledge suddenly becomes invaluable.

This is why our itineraries begin with a conversation.

Not with a destination. Not with a package. Not with a list of attractions.

They begin with you.

We live in extraordinary times for travel planning.

Information is everywhere. You can find opening hours, train schedules, hotel reviews, restaurant recommendations, historical facts, maps, photographs and thousands of suggested itineraries in seconds.

Artificial intelligence can now process an extraordinary amount of information and produce an itinerary in seconds.

And honestly, that is impressive.

We use technology ourselves. We would be rather foolish not to.

But there is something technology cannot replace: lived experiences.

An AI can tell you that a particular town is beautiful. It cannot experience a walk through the town on a foggy winter day.

It has not arrived there on a grey Tuesday afternoon when half the restaurants are closed. It has not walked through its streets in August when the heat makes a supposedly “easy” itinerary into hell. It has not discovered that the famous viewpoint is spectacular at sunset but completely underwhelming at noon.

It has not sat in a restaurant that received wonderful reviews and thought, “Really?”

It has not found a tiny family-run place by chance and remembered it five years later.

It has not changed its opinion about a destination after returning several times.

And it has certainly not had that wonderfully inconvenient experience of getting somewhere and realising that the reality is completely different from what everyone promised.

We have.

Many times.

And those experiences matter.

Because when we design an itinerary, we are not only asking, “What is interesting here?”

We are also asking, “What is actually worth someone’s time?”

And even more importantly: “If I were in their shoes, what would I enjoy most?”

That distinction is enormous.

One of the things we value most about our work is that our recommendations have consequences.

If we recommend a destination, organise a local guide, choose a route, suggest a restaurant or arrange an experience, we are putting our own reputation behind it.

That creates a very different relationship with travel planning.

We cannot simply copy what everyone else is saying. We have to know why we are recommending something.

And sometimes our recommendation is to skip it. 

There are places that are extraordinary but simply do not fit into a particular itinerary. There are famous attractions that are absolutely worth visiting — but perhaps not after three similar experiences. There are destinations that are wonderful in the right season and disappointing in the wrong one.

There are routes that look short on a map and take much longer in reality. There are places that are worth the journey because of what happens once you arrive. And there are places where the journey itself is the experience.

This kind of knowledge accumulates slowly. It comes from travelling, from guiding, from listening. It comes from getting things wrong, and from going back.

Spain Private Guides was where this philosophy first took shape.

But as our own lives and work expanded, so did our geographical perspective.

Dolça, born and raised in Spain, lived for many years in Italy. I have lived and worked in Germany for more than twenty years. We know Spain intimately. We have strong connections in Portugal and Morocco. We travel.

And we began to realise that the same questions travellers were asking us about Spain were coming up everywhere.

People wanted to travel beyond the obvious. They wanted to understand places rather than simply photograph them. They wanted to combine famous landmarks with less predictable experiences.

They wanted local knowledge without necessarily travelling in a rigid group. They wanted someone who could help them make sense of a destination before they arrived — and sometimes help them while they were already there.

In other words, they wanted the same thing we had been creating in Spain, but elsewhere.

And that was the beginning of TravelerSe.

TravelerSe was created as an evolution of what we had already learned through Spain Private Guides.

It is not about creating another collection of standard tours.

It is about bringing our way of thinking about travel to a wider range of destinations.

The name itself reflects the idea behind it: travel from the perspective of the traveller.

Not the destination. Not the supplier. Not the standard package.

The traveller. Your perspective.

Perhaps you want to see the great monuments but hate queues. Perhaps you love beautiful hotels but are more interested in the neighbourhood around them. Perhaps you want excellent food but have no interest (or budget) to spend every evening in a Michelin-starred restaurant.

Perhaps you want history, but not a history lecture.

Perhaps you want luxury, but not the kind that feels sterile and global.

These nuances are exactly what make personalised travel interesting.

We are not trying to replace your travel dreams

There is another important part of our philosophy: We do not believe that travellers need someone to tell them what their trip should be.

Quite the opposite.

We believe that you bring the curiosity, and we bring the experience.

The best itineraries are collaborative.

You may arrive with a list of places you have dreamed about for years. We may look at that list and suggest moving things around. Perhaps we add something you have never heard of. Perhaps we remove something that sounds wonderful on paper but would make the journey unnecessarily complicated.

Perhaps we tell you that your idea is excellent.

Or perhaps we tell you that it is not.

And sometimes we will say, “Actually, there is another way of doing this.”

That conversation is where the magic happens.

The expression we keep coming back to is simple: person-to-person travel.

Travelling is ultimately about people.

The person planning the journey. The people who live in the places we visit. The guides who tell their stories. The driver who knows the road.

The chef who has been making the same dish for thirty years. The owner of the small winery. The museum expert who can explain why one painting matters more than another.

And, of course, the travellers themselves.

We want to create journeys where these connections have room to happen.

Not because every moment needs to be “authentic” — I really dislike this word by now — but because travel becomes meaningful when we engage with a place beyond its surface.

After years of doing this, we have learned that good travel planning is partly about logistics.

Trains need to connect. Drivers need to arrive. Tickets need to be booked. Museums have opening hours. Meal times are different in every culture.

And occasionally, despite our best efforts, a train is late because apparently even European trains have personalities.

But logistics are only the foundation.

The real work is understanding why one choice is better suited to a particular journey than another.

It is understanding rhythm.

A good itinerary needs breathing space. It needs contrast. It needs a certain amount of spontaneity.

It should have moments of discovery that were not necessarily highlighted in bold letters on a website.

And above all, it should feel coherent. You should not finish a trip feeling as though you have simply collected destinations. You should feel that you have experienced a place.

Tourism Artisans remains at the heart of everything we do.

The name says a lot about our philosophy.

An artisan does not mass-produce. An artisan pays attention. An artisan understands materials, techniques and context. An artisan knows that quality is found in details.

That is how we approach travel.

We do not want to produce hundreds of identical itineraries. We want to create journeys that have been thought through. We want to use our knowledge carefully. We want to work with people we trust. And we want every recommendation to have a reason behind it.

Our motto has always been:

Excellence is not an accident.

It is the result of knowledge, attention, experience and care.

TravelerSe is the next chapter.

It grew naturally from everything we had already learned: from Spain Private Guides, from years of guiding, from travelling ourselves, and from countless conversations with clients.

It also grew from discovering wonderful places — and from discovering that some supposedly wonderful places were perhaps slightly less wonderful than advertised.

We have learned that a traveller does not necessarily need more information; they simply need the right information.

The right destination. The right route. The right guide. The right amount of time. The right balance between the places everyone knows and the places they would never have found alone.

That is what we want TravelerSe to offer.

Not a formula. Not a package. Not an algorithm deciding what you should see.

TravelerSe is a conversation. A point of view. A carefully considered journey.

And, whenever possible, a little bit of the feeling we have when we travel ourselves: the excitement of not knowing exactly what is around the next corner.

Because ultimately, that is why we travel.

Not to complete a list. Not to collect photographs. Not even simply to see beautiful places.

We travel because somewhere along the way, something unexpected happens.

A conversation. A landscape. A meal. A story. A building. A road. A person. 

Even a new love.

A moment that stays with us long after the suitcase has been unpacked.

That is the kind of travel we believe in.

And that is why we created TravelerSe.

Travel personally. Travel thoughtfully. Travel beyond the obvious.

Welcome to TravelerSe.