Ana Ferreira
Founder and route planner
Spent nine years as a mountain guide before deciding the planning was the part she loved most.
About the studio
We plan fewer trips,
and we plan them properly
Wayfare Travels started in 2014 with one route, one guide and a stubborn idea: that the best trips are the ones with the fewest things in them.
How we work
01Our philosophy
Most itineraries are too full. We spend our time taking things out.
The first version of every trip we write is too long. Somebody in the studio reads it, crosses out a day, and asks what you would actually miss. Usually the answer is nothing, and what you gain is an afternoon with no plan in it, which is where most of the good parts of travelling happen.
We are nine people in a studio in Lisbon, and between us we have guided, cooked, driven and photographed in most of the places on this site. Nothing goes on the list until one of us has walked it, slept in it and eaten there. That is why the list is short and why it stays short.
We also say no. If February is the wrong month for the thing you want to do, we will tell you and suggest you wait, even when it costs us the booking. We have built the whole business on being the people you believe.
2014Studio founded in Lisbon
48Countries we plan in
5,200Travellers sent out
91%Who book with us again
02What we hold to
Four rules we have never broken
These are not marketing lines. Each one has cost us money at some point, and each one is the reason people come back.
01
Fewer places, longer stays
We would rather you saw one valley properly than five countries from a coach window. Almost every itinerary we write is shorter than the one people ask for.
02
Local guides, paid properly
Every guide on our trips lives in the region they work in, is employed directly, and is paid above the local market rate. We publish that policy because too few agencies do.
03
Small groups, always
Six to ten travellers, never more. It is the difference between being welcomed into a village and arriving in one.
04
Honest about the hard parts
If a walk is long, we say so. If the weather is likely to ruin a day, we build in a spare one. Nobody has ever enjoyed a surprise at altitude.
03How we work
Four steps, and one person who owns the whole thing
- 01
We ask better questions
Not where do you want to go, but what do you want a day to feel like. The route comes out of the answer.
- 02
We go there first
Nothing goes on this site until somebody from the studio has walked it, slept in it and eaten there. That is why the list is short.
- 03
We build in slack
A spare day in every week, a second route for every forecast, and a guide with the authority to change the plan at breakfast.
- 04
We stay reachable
One person owns your trip from the first email to the day you land home, and you have their direct number the whole way.
04The studio
The people who answer your email
Four of the nine. The rest are guides, drivers and fixers who work with us season after season in the places they were born in.
Idris Bakri
North Africa and Middle East
Grew up in Tinghir, knows every guesthouse between Marrakech and the dunes, and will argue about tea.
Mei Tanaka
Asia and craft programmes
A documentary photographer who built our workshop network across Kyoto, Bali and Kyrgyzstan.
Johan Lind
Northern Europe and expeditions
Eleven Patagonia seasons and more Lofoten winters than he will admit to on a form.
05In their words
What travellers say afterwards
“We asked for quiet and we got it. Two weeks in the Faroes without once feeling like a tourist.”
Marcus D.Faroe Islands
“The Kyoto week was the first trip where I came home feeling like I had met people, not just seen things.”
Priya N.Kyoto, Japan
“They moved our Patagonia route three times around the weather. We stood under the towers on the one clear morning.”
Tomas R.Torres del Paine
Come and talk to us
The best trips start with a bad first email
Nobody knows exactly what they want at the beginning. Send us a rough idea, a month, a feeling, and we will turn it into something real.
