Lantern Bay Travel is a boutique travel design studio in San Francisco, founded in 2008 to build trips the way an architect builds a house: slowly, to a brief, and with every detail settled before anyone signs anything. We design private itineraries, small-group journeys and longer expeditions, and we run the same five-step process for all of them.
The studio has stayed small deliberately. Three designers take every enquiry, and each brings a different instinct to the first conversation, which usually decides who should lead the trip.
The three designers
- Vivian Marsh works on luxury itineraries: lodges, villas, suites, and the sequencing that lets each day build on the one before it.
- Theo Radcliffe handles adventure and small-group travel: trekking, safaris, permits, and the logistics that decide whether a remote trip comes together.
- Simone Aubert focuses on Europe and food: seasons, neighborhoods, tables worth booking, and the timing that keeps you ahead of the busiest weeks.
One designer owns your trip from first call to debrief, so you never have to explain the same dates twice. The other two read the proposals, which is a quieter form of quality control.
How a trip gets built
The process runs in five steps, and each one leaves you with something concrete rather than a promise. The order matters as much as the steps do.
- Consultation: 45 to 60 minutes on dates, pace, budget range and the things that must not go wrong.
- Proposal: an itemized route with room categories, transport and costs, delivered within 5 to 10 business days.
- Booking: deposits and balances staged in writing, with every confirmation filed in one document you keep.
- Pre-departure brief: contacts, timings, documents and local notes, sent about 30 days before you fly.
- In-trip support: one number that reaches us while you travel, then a short debrief once you are home.
We ask for one revision round as part of the proposal, because the first draft is a conversation rather than a verdict. After that, changes are priced and scheduled honestly.
Who we work with
Most of our clients plan one significant trip a year rather than several small ones: a family crossing generations, two people marking an anniversary, a group of friends who want a proper route without running it themselves. They tend to value a well-ordered day over a long list of sights.
The start-here page maps our thirteen guides to the situations travelers bring us most often, and the contact page carries everything we need to answer a first enquiry. Either is a good place to begin.