Test Advisor

Alexis Berlin is the Chief Growth Officer at Travel with Awestruck, a luxury travel advisory and member of the Signature Travel Network. She joined the firm her mother founded and built the infrastructure behind its client work: the supplier relationships, the research process, and the standards that govern every itinerary that leaves the office.

Before travel, Alexis was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company. She spent those years solving problems for large organizations under real pressure and real deadlines. She brings the same discipline to a two-week trip to Australia or a family reunion in Mallorca. The stakes are different. The rigor is not.

Alexis holds a degree in philosophy from Harvard, where she graduated with high honors. She has been hosted as one of a small group of North American luxury buyers at the Australian Tourism Exchange, and she travels roughly a third of the year to keep her recommendations first-hand rather than secondhand.

Most travel planning starts with a destination. Mine starts with a diagnosis.

The first conversation is not about hotels. It is about what you actually want from the time away, who you are traveling with, what has disappointed you before, and what you would quietly regret missing. People rarely lead with the real answer. My job is to find it, and then build the trip around it.

What follows is a plan, not a menu. I make recommendations and I tell you why. If two properties are close, I say so. If one is clearly right for you, I say that instead of handing you five options and calling it choice. You are hiring judgment, not a search engine.

The execution matters as much as the design. Every reservation is confirmed and reconfirmed. Every transfer is timed against real arrival patterns, not schedules. You receive a single document that tells you where you are, when, and what to do about it. When something breaks abroad, and occasionally it does, you have a phone number that answers.

My background is in management consulting. That is not a credential I mention for decoration. It is the reason the work runs the way it does: structured research, clear reasoning, and a plan that holds up when conditions change.