Directional Strategies Travel

We booked our honeymoon to Maui with Dave. In our initial meeting, Dave listened to our interests to assess what island on Hawaii would interest us and showed us hotels that suited our taste and budget..He had real photos..not the hotels advertising pictures. Dave kept in touch frequently throughout the process and we had a meeting before we left with tips and tricks of where to go and how to drive on certain unique roads. I looked into booking ourselves at first because I thought booking through a travel agent would be expensive, but it was actually slightly less or about the same. And you get the service of someone with knowledge of the area to help plan your trip in advance. They won't show you something that is out of your budget, but the only downfall is we didn't really get an estimate price of what we planned on booking until a few months later when prices would be more optimal. I think they don't want to give you an estimate and then be off by a lot, but it would still be nice to know a reasonable range for your planning. We had the best time in Maui and I am so glad that we booked with Directional Strategies!

We got set up with a great suite in St. Lucia's La Toc Sandal's Resort. It was very personalize and we were taken care of at Directional Strategies. We had a blast on our honeymoon :)

I would give NO STARS if I could. I met David Smith with Directional Strategies at a Bridal Show. We used him to book a 2+ wk honeymoon to Tahiti, Moorea and Bora Bora. David had visited the islands himself several times and was very knowledgeable, however there are a few serious reasons why I would not recommend him or this agency for booking this type of trip. The first red flag came as we debated adding an extra day to our time in Bora Bora. When we finally decided to (the room we had was over $1,000 per night) he told us that actually there was a promotion with stay 4 nights get the fifth night free, so it would be no cost! However he didn't tell us about this until we added the 5th night! We eventually added even more time, but we found that odd that he never offered up that we could get the free night. The biggest complaint I have is that all through the planning process he told us that we would be limited to 44lbs of luggage each for our inner-island flight to Bora Bora. I expressed a lot of concern about this as we were planning a long trip and I am NOT a light packer. His only suggestions were to "learn to pack light". Well I investigated myself online and found on the Air Tahiti website an option for "Z class" that allows each passenger 110 lbs of baggage allowance. I emailed him to request the upgrade and included the link to the info I found, and he replied that I was looking at the wrong airline (I was not- he had it confused with Air Tahiti Nui). When he realized his error, he then wrote to advise he had checked with the airline and that the upgrade was not available for at least one of our flights, so it would not be possible to upgrade us. Some time passed and I continued to stress about the weight restrictions. I spent a huge amount of time reading up on packing light, researching luggage options and ultimately buying several new pieces of wheel-less luggage just for this trip. Eventually we ended up contacting the airline directly and they advised that actually, the upgrade was indeed available! We forwarded this note to David, who came back again saying that they must be mistaken as he checked again and couldn't get it for us. Again, we wrote the airline, and they ended up upgrading it for us and advising us to pay the difference to our travel agent and he could re-issue our boarding passes. It took several more contacts with him to actually get him to do this... and what was really shocking is that it ended up being only a $25 upgrade to more than double the baggage allowance! We were extremely unhappy that he made this process so difficult, but we didn't want to cancel our trip and have to re-book elsewhere at that point. We felt like he wasn't really working for us, and that is was somehow beneficial to him to not give us the upgrade. It seemed so odd that a "Certified Tahiti Expert" would not suggest upgrading to Z class when his clients were obviously very concerned about the weight restrictions. Furthermore, we stayed exclusively at 5 stars resorts in the highest room categories available, and this trip cost in excess of 20k so you would think he would understand that we were going for luxury... unfortunately, there was an experience on our trip that felt just the opposite. He scheduled us for a 30 minute public ferry transfer from Tahiti to Moorea that was the most horric experience! We later found out a nice 10min flight was another option, though he never offered it to us. Definitely go elsewhere.

Sandra from Directional Strategies Travel planned my Destination Wedding/ Honeymoon. She did an excellent job of attending to every detail. We got married at Sandals Dunn River Falls Villagio in Jamaica. She went above and beyond.