Seventeen years, one office, four consultants.
We stopped competing on price a long time ago and started competing on judgement. This is what that looks like in practice.
Harbourline began in 2009 in a two-room office above a stationer in Ballard Estate, with one telephone line, a fax machine that outlived its usefulness, and a filing cabinet that is still in the corner. The trade around us changed completely. What we do did not.
In those years the internet took over the easy half of this business, and it was welcome to it. Nobody needs an agent to buy a Mumbai–Goa return. What the internet never replaced is the difficult half: the Schengen file with a gap in the bank statement, the honeymoon where the seaplane does not fly after dark, the group of ninety with three dietary requirements and one visa refusal, the passenger stranded at Frankfurt at two in the morning who needs a human being rather than a chat window.
So we stopped competing on price and started competing on judgement. We do not run a payment page. We do not publish live fares. We do not have a target for how many packages a consultant must sell in a month, because a target like that is how travellers end up in the wrong hotel. What we have instead is four people who have each spent more than a decade doing this, a filing discipline we are unreasonable about, and a telephone that gets answered.
Roughly seven in ten enquiries now come from someone we have already travelled. That is the only marketing metric we watch.
— Rukmini Shirodkar and Aftab Fernandes, partners
Four people. Your file belongs to one of them.
No call centre, no rotating queue, no bot. An extension and a mobile number on every itinerary.
Your file belongs to one of these four, by name, with a direct extension and a mobile number on your itinerary. When they are on leave you are told who is covering and until when: before the trip, not during it.
What a booking site does well, and where a desk earns its keep.
We are genuinely not against the internet. We use the same screens you do. But the two models are good at opposite things, and you should know which one your trip needs.
- It is one flight, one city, one hotel, no visa
- You are flexible and chasing the lowest fare
- Nothing about the trip is irreversible
- A visa, a group, or an elderly traveller is involved
- The itinerary has more than three moving parts
- It is a honeymoon, an anniversary or a once-only trip
- You want one person accountable when it goes wrong
Tell us the shape of the trip. We will tell you what it really takes.
No payment page. No live fares. A written quote within one working day.