The process
The same person who plans your trip is the one who looks after it.
It begins with five minutes — our travel profile, or a note on WhatsApp. Who is coming, roughly when, and what a good day away feels like to you. No forty-field forms, no obligation. Just enough for us to understand you, and to know whether we are the right people for the trip you have in mind.
Within two hours, a trip designer reads your brief — a real person, not a queue. The one assigned to you has walked the lanes they are sending you down, eaten at the counter they will book for you, and knows which room at which hotel is worth asking for. You will have their name before you have an itinerary.
What arrives is a considered journey, written as prose rather than a menu to assemble yourself. You will have opinions — you should. We expect you to push back, and we refine until the shape of it feels unmistakably like yours. Nothing is confirmed until it is.
The designer who planned your trip is the one who answers when a flight moves at midnight, or the children decide they would rather see the temple after all. One person, beginning to end. No handovers, no call centre, no starting your story again with a stranger.
Always private
Every journey in the catalog runs privately, by default. You will not share a vehicle, a guide, or a dinner table with people you did not choose. The dates are yours to set.
And if a trip you have seen is almost right but not quite — a week longer, an anniversary in the middle, the grandparents joining in Kyoto — there is a single line on every page: Make this private. It is not a separate, costlier product. It is simply how Cimara works.
Two ways to travel
Two tiers, one standard of care. The difference is in the rooms, the access, and how rare the moments are — never in how closely you are looked after.
For the traveller who wants it considered, not complicated. Boutique stays with a point of view, private guiding where it changes the day, and an itinerary with room to breathe.
When the occasion asks for more. The rooms everyone hopes for, the tables that do not take reservations, access arranged quietly in advance — and a senior designer who is never more than a message away.
What it costs
You will never see “starting from”. The price we show is the price you pay — flights handled, the stays, private guiding, transfers, the dinners worth planning around, and the help when something changes. We would rather quote honestly once than surprise you later. There are no membership fees, and nothing to join.
The people
Cimara is deliberately small. A handful of designers, each with parts of the world they know in their bones — Japan, East Africa, the Nordics, Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean. You are matched to the one who knows your destination best, and you stay with them. We would rather design fewer trips beautifully than many trips adequately.
Before you ask
No — and we are particular about that. We do not sell fixed itineraries off a shelf. Every journey is designed around the people travelling and run privately for them alone.
No. Private is the default. The only exceptions are a small number of one-off departures each year — Antarctica, the Galápagos — and those are always clearly marked as such.
For most destinations, eight to twelve weeks is comfortable. Japan in cherry-blossom season, Kenya during the Migration, and the Aurora months fill earlier — the sooner we begin, the better the rooms.
Yes. The catalog is where most people start, not the limit of what we do. Tell us what you have in mind and we will build it around you.
We arrange the whole thing — international flights, visa guidance, on-ground transfers, and travel insurance — so there is one plan and one point of contact, not five tabs open at midnight.
None. Nothing to subscribe to, and nothing to pay before you travel beyond the trip itself. You begin with a conversation.
Start planning
Five minutes is all it takes to begin. We’ll do the rest.