By Dr. Daniela Ferdico
The first question I ask every client is not where they want to go.
It’s not what their budget is, how many stars they want in a hotel or how many countries they want to cover or whether they prefer beach or city or mountain. Those questions come later, and even then they’re not quite the right questions.
The first thing I ask is this: What was your favorite travel experience ever — and what did it feel like?
Not what did you see; not where did you go. What did it feel like. What was different about that trip compared to every other trip you’ve taken? What did you carry home in your body that you couldn’t quite explain to anyone who wasn’t there?
Most people have never been asked this question by a travel advisor. Most people have never been asked this question at all. And the answers — when they come, and they always come — tell me almost everything I need to know.
I spent twenty years as a neuropsychologist learning to listen beneath the surface of what people say. In clinical work, what someone presents with is rarely the whole story. A child who struggles to focus in school is not simply distracted — there is something beneath that, some unmet need or misunderstood wiring or environmental mismatch that, once understood, changes everything about how you help them. The presenting complaint is the beginning of the conversation, not the answer.
Travel works the same way.
When someone tells me they want to relax, I don’t book them a beach resort. I ask them what relaxation actually means to their particular nervous system. Do you want to feel at peace — and if so, what kind of environment creates that for you? Silence or gentle noise? Solitude or the comfortable presence of others? Wide open landscapes or enclosed intimate spaces? Do you want to feel the breeze of ocean or altitude of the mountains? Movement or stillness?
Because here’s what most people don’t realize: what relaxes one person activates another. A busy Moroccan medina is overwhelming and exhausting for someone who needs quiet to decompress, and deeply enlivening for someone who regulates through sensory richness and human connection. Booking both of them into the same itinerary because Morocco is beautiful — which it is — serves only one of them.
The destination is not the prescription; You are the prescription. The destination is what we choose once I understand you.
Most travel advisors start with location, budget, and a checklist of sights.
I understand why — it’s efficient, it’s what clients expect, and it produces perfectly adequate trips. Trips that look beautiful on Instagram and feel, if you’re honest about it, a little like someone else’s life. You saw the things you were supposed to see, you stayed somewhere lovely, you came home with photographs check. And something was missing, though you couldn’t quite say what.
What was missing was you. The itinerary was built around the destination rather than around the person standing inside it.
I ask about hotels differently too. Not how many stars, not which amenities are on the list — but what does it feel like to be truly taken care of? What has a hotel done for you in the past that made you feel seen rather than just served? Is it the greeting at arrival, the sheets on the bed, the feeling of an actual key in your hand, the way the architecture envelops you, the staff who remembered your name on day three? What I’m listening for is not a preference but a value — what you need from a place in order to feel safe enough to actually rest.
That understanding goes into a document I send to the hotel before you arrive – Your story: What matters to you, who you are, what you need. So that when you walk through the door, they already know.
Josephine came to me wanting to celebrate something.
She had been through years of not finding the right person, years of hoping and adjusting expectations and quietly wondering. And then she had. She was going to Paris on New Year’s Eve with her boyfriend — her first serious relationship in a long time — and she was so happy she could barely contain it.
She mentioned, almost as an aside, that she hoped to get some nice photos.
I heard something underneath that. Not just nice photos — she wanted evidence. Proof that this was real, that this happiness was real, that she and this person had stood together in Paris on New Year’s Eve and it had been as beautiful as it felt. She wanted something to hold onto.
So I designed a three-hour golden hour walk through the most romantic photo locations in Paris — not the obvious ones, but the hidden corners and perfect angles that only locals know. The goal of making two people look like they’re completely alone in a city of two million. Where to stand, how to pose, what to put in the background, how to catch the light. She came home with photographs she described as treasures. Images of herself in love in Paris that she will have for the rest of her life. An opportunity to celebrate and relax into this relationship.
That is what I heard underneath I hope to get some nice photos – That is what twenty years of clinical work taught me to listen for.
The question I am always really asking — in every beginning conversation, in every follow-up, in every detail I choose to include or leave out of an itinerary — is not what do you want to see.
It is who are you when you are most yourself, and what kind of place brings that person forward. The destination is my answer to that question. Everything else follows.
Dr. Daniela Ferdico is a neuropsychologist and founder of Evocative Travel, a luxury travel practice that designs journeys around the neuroscience of who you are. Every itinerary begins with a conversation.
