Case study · En Route Luxe · 2025–
A business run on agents
The lifelong travel advisor. One relationship that holds your family's story: the babymoon, the first safari with kids, the anniversary you didn't have time to plan. Every trip that matters, for decades.
En Route Luxe is a boutique luxury travel advisory I founded and run. Behind the human touch runs an agent I built with Claude Code: it drafts every itinerary from the family's profile and runs its own check before I see it. Agents draft. Guardrails check. The founder edits.
By the numbers
Real clients, real revenue, real margin
- 20+
- clients a year
- 50+
- trips a year
- $700K+
- in bookings, 2026 to date
- 100%
- repeat and referral growth
Grown entirely through repeat bookings and referrals. No paid acquisition. 100% repeat and referral growth is the early proof of lifelong relationships: a client who hands you their next trip, and their sister's honeymoon, is telling you the relationship is the product.
What clients say
“We'd been to Africa before, but never like this. They knew exactly when and where to be — the migration crossing we witnessed wasn't luck, it was planning.”
“Japan was our dream trip for years. We were overwhelmed until En Route Luxe showed us it wasn't about doing more — it was about timing it right. Our kids still call it the best week of their lives.”
“What surprised us most was what they told us NOT to do. That restraint — knowing what to skip — made the trip feel effortless instead of exhausting.”
Destinations
Where the trips go
Itineraries designed across 30+ countries, including:
- Japan
- Kenya
- Tanzania
- South Africa
- Namibia
- Zimbabwe
- Italy
- Greece
- Croatia
- Thailand
- Cambodia
- Spain
- Portugal
- England & Scotland
- French Polynesia
- The Bahamas
- + more
Trips designed across four continents
The operating stack
Agents draft. Guardrails check. The founder edits.
The advisory runs on a stack built and shipped daily: the itinerary builder, an agent that compiles a family's profile (explicit intake answers, conversational signals from the call, behavioral signals from past trips) into constraints, drafts the day-by-day itinerary, builds the client page, and runs its own check step; around it, Claude Code skills for the recurring work, a flight-search MCP server, and a markdown knowledge base. Every output ends at a decision point: approve, redirect, or kill.
Data and tools
- Destination intelligence: 190+ destinations
- Flight-search MCP server
- Markdown knowledge base
- Call transcripts and research ingest
Agents draft
- Itinerary builder: profile to constraints to draft
- Itinerary QA critic: read-only, fresh context
- Research ingestion and meeting sync
- Post editors with receipt tests
- Lead replies drafted into the inbox
Guardrails check
- Closures on the day scheduled
- Ticket windows on a clock
- Transfer buffers
- Contingency paths
- Jet-lag pacing
- Verified vs estimated pricing
- Stale venues
- Golden set: checker recall and precision
The editor layer: the founder decides
- Approve, redirect, or kill
- Supplier selection stays human
- Disruption response stays human
- Taste stays human
The discipline that makes it work: knowing what NOT to automate. Judgment is the only step that does not scale, so the system spends the founder's time only there.
That boundary was not drawn in the abstract. A general model will book a museum that is closed that day, and it does not know that Shibuya Sky sunset tickets have to be sourced exactly fourteen days in advance. Further out, an African camp is effectively offline: there is no API, and the last mile is a human relationship. Each of those is a guardrail now. Cataloguing where a model is confidently wrong is the same practice as building an eval set, run from the operator side rather than the platform side. Today each class is a check: a golden set of trips with expected findings, a checker scored on recall and precision, a scorecard per draft, and a dispositions log where every accepted, rejected, or fixed finding feeds per-class precision. The policy is enforced in tooling, not prose: every action is act alone, draft, or escalate; the email permission is draft-only; every site change goes through a pull request. The architecture is public in agent-skills.
The judgment story
Six weeks out, the airline cancelled
Kenya and Tanzania: 25 travelers, six families, timed to the Great Migration. Six weeks before departure, the airline cancelled the route.
An agent would have rebooked the same plan on the next available carrier. That is what optimization looks like when the objective function is “restore the itinerary.”
The actual call: re-route the entire group through London, absorb 12 time zones with kids, and turn the disruption into the trip's strongest opening. Camp selection followed the same logic: location beats brand in the reserve.
That wasn't a data lookup. It was taste, timing, sequencing, and knowing when the obvious answer is wrong. For trips that have to count, that judgment IS the product.
The same review pattern that gated 1M+ documents a year at Zillow now runs a travel advisory. Different stakes, same discipline: agents draft, guardrails check, the human decides.