Travel With Lauryn

Meet Lauryn Lantela, Travel Experience Designer

Ask Lauryn what she does and she will not say travel agent. She calls herself a travel experience designer, and once you understand how she works, the distinction makes sense. She is not taking your order and clicking a button. She is building the trip around you.

Lauryn grew up in Toronto and moved to Vancouver in 2004, and she has spent more than twenty years in the travel industry since. Corporate travel, agency management, leisure trips, weddings, large group logistics. That range is why nothing rattles her. Her own brand, Travel with Lauryn, is still fairly new, but the foundation underneath it took two decades to build.

What Planning a Trip with a Travel Advisor Actually Feels Like

The first conversation is mostly questions. Where are you going, who is coming, what does a good day look like for you, what would ruin it. Lauryn describes it as pulling the trip out of you, because most people know more about what they want than they realize. Someone says they want a week away and no destination in mind, so she floats Iceland, and they say something warm, and now she knows exactly where to start looking.

That is the whole method. Everybody wants something specific from a vacation. Her job is to find out what yours is before a single booking gets made. One reviewer described how she asked detailed questions up front to understand their flight and hotel preferences, then came back with a free resort upgrade they had not asked for. Another wrote that Lauryn walks you through everything you need and helps you at every step of the way.

A Travel Agent Who Has Actually Stayed at the Resorts

This is where the twenty years show up. Lauryn has personally stayed at a long list of all inclusive resorts across Mexico and the Caribbean, so when she recommends a property she is telling you about the pool she swam in and the beach she walked. She was married in Greece in 2017 and knows the islands the way you only can when you keep going back. She has travelled both islands of New Zealand and is a certified specialist for Australia and New Zealand. She holds cruise certifications with Princess, Royal Caribbean, Viking and others, plus Disney and hotel brand accreditations, and she is on training webinars constantly because this industry changes daily and going stale is not an option.

You will feel that difference in the recommendations. They are specific, and they are matched to how you actually travel.

Family Vacations, Destination Weddings and Group Travel

Families are a big part of her work. One review walks through a first trip to Mexico with two adults, a three year old, an eight month old and a grandmother, and Lauryn handled the parts that sink family trips: a genuinely kid friendly hotel in the right location, cribs and daybeds confirmed in the rooms, everything mapped out before departure. The word that came back was easy. Stress free planning is the whole point.

She has also planned hundreds of group trips, including destination weddings, school groups and sports teams, which means contracts, room blocks and timelines are familiar territory rather than a scramble.

The Part Nobody Thinks About Until Something Goes Wrong

Here is the reason to have someone like Lauryn in your phone. Airline strikes, cancelled flights, a family vacation booked months ago that suddenly has no way to get there. She has already lived through this repeatedly with Canadian carriers, and she moves fast, rebooking people ahead of trouble rather than waiting for the collapse.

What you are really getting is a translator. Lauryn understands how airlines work on the back end, so she can talk to them in their own language instead of you sitting in a queue trying to explain your situation to someone who has heard it four hundred times that morning. One client wrote that she was a lifesaver when their airline cancelled the flight home, and called her proactive and someone who has your back when things go sideways.

She is reachable by text, by phone, on WhatsApp. She has taken calls at one in the morning from clients in trouble somewhere far away. That availability is not a marketing line, it is how she runs the business.

Honest Advice and Transparent Fees

Lauryn is direct about something that bothers her: there are part time agents out there who do not stay current, do not use real booking systems, and quietly mark up your trip. She does not work that way. Her fee structure is flat, disclosed up front, and only applies in the narrow situation where the supplier is not paying her. Book a cruise, a tour or a package and there is no booking fee at all. Come back two weeks later to add a hotel to the same trip and you are not charged again.

One client, who has both worked alongside her and booked travel through her, described her simply as ethical and someone who takes great care finding clients exactly what they need. That is the reputation she has built.

Cruises, Expeditions and Bucket List Journeys

Lauryn cruises herself, across the Caribbean, Europe, the Mexican Riviera and Alaska, and she is good at the questions first time cruisers do not know to ask about ships, itineraries and cabins. Lately she has been pushing further into expedition travel, the kind of voyage that takes you toward Antarctica and the wildlife down there. If that trip has been sitting on your list, she is the person to talk to about it.

Working with a Local Travel Agent in Surrey and the Lower Mainland

Roughly ninety percent of Lauryn’s clients are here in British Columbia, and she works with travellers across Surrey, Vancouver and the surrounding communities, along with a handful of longtime clients back east and overseas. Everything happens by phone, text, email or video, so distance is never the issue.

One last thing you will probably learn about her within a few conversations: she is a serious concert person, hundreds of shows deep, a habit that started because her mother helped open the SkyDome in Toronto and Lauryn essentially grew up in a stadium. It tells you something about her. She has spent her whole life chasing the experience, not just the ticket.

If you have a trip in mind, or just a stretch of time off and no plan yet, that is exactly the conversation she wants to have.