Zicasso Travel Stories: We Wouldn't Have Trusted It If We'd Found It Ourselves

Steve contacted Zicasso, along with three other US-based companies with strong reviews. He treated the process as an investigation: build a rough itinerary, send it to each one, see what comes back. One of the three other companies dropped out early; it wasn't a good fit. The remaining two put together itineraries that, on paper, looked comparable to what Zicasso proposed. Then Zicasso did something the others hadn't: it connected Steve and Deb with a travel specialist for Vietnam and Cambodia, someone with a network of regional relationships on the ground, while Zicasso stood behind the recommendation.

The itineraries were similar in quality across the board. The price was not. What their Zicasso specialist put together came in well below the other two US-based companies, enough to give Steve pause.

"If I'd found something priced like that on my own, searching around online, I don't think I would have booked it," he said. "It would have felt too good to be true. Having Zicasso… standing behind it and vetting it, that's what got us over the hump."

Deb put it more simply: Zicasso's vetting took the research off her plate. For a couple who otherwise likes to independently verify who they're working with, that was the difference between a great price that felt risky and a great price that provided value.

"Knowing how Zicasso vets its specialists is what made the difference," Steve said. "We were pleased with the security of a US-based company connecting us to that level of local knowledge. We never would have found it on our own."

Value wasn’t the only advantage of working with a Zicasso travel specialist for Vietnam and Cambodia. It was also geography. Steve and Deb's itinerary moved through Hanoi, Hoi An, Siem Reap, and Saigon, and their specialist had someone reachable in each location, all in the same time zone as the couple. This meant that when something needed handling immediately, it happened in real time, not overnight from a US office six or seven time zones away.

The moment that proved it was flying from Cambodia to Saigon. Their flight time shifted, and they were due to land four hours later than planned. It wasn't a true crisis that would leave the Valleys completely stranded, but Steve didn't know whether anyone on the ground was even aware of the change. He reached out over WhatsApp. The specialist already knew, and the transportation was already taken care of.

"That's what drove home the point of having someone local," Steve said. "If we'd gone with a US-based company only, it would have been the middle of the night there. We wouldn't have gotten that kind of support."

Deb travels frequently and often skips a travel agent in destinations that feel familiar, but said Southeast Asia called for a different level of support. Not a fully guided, handheld tour, just someone reachable, local, and already ahead of any possible problems.

Steve and Deb wanted what their Zicasso specialist built for them: no hand-holding every second, but not full autonomy either; they wanted a guide for half their time in each destination, with the other half open to explore on their own with what they'd learned. It's a structure that shows up throughout their itinerary: a full-day village biking tour through the countryside outside Hanoi, for instance, paired with unstructured afternoons in Hanoi, Hoi An, and Siem Reap built in around it.

The biking day outside Hanoi was one of their favorite moments, and it wasn’t originally planned. The route wound through a village and rice paddies, crossed a river by local boat, passed through an ancient citadel, and ended with a local food stop that didn’t feel touristy at all.

"It wasn't about the food itself," Steve said. "It was that it felt like something we'd never have found ourselves. You're riding through the countryside with a guide who knows exactly where to turn, and you get to just experience being there instead of worrying about navigating."

Even on their own time, Steve and Deb weren't really on their own. Every guide left them a WhatsApp number before they parted ways, an offer that turned out not to be a formality. When they asked where to find good bánh mì, the answer didn’t come from a guidebook. It also wasn’t a place they could have found listed online. The guides helped open doors the Valleys hadn’t considered before.

"The guides were fantastic," Deb said. "Even during the time we had to ourselves, having someone we could text if we had a question made all the difference. And they knew the places that weren't in any guidebook."

What stood out to Steve wasn't only price and presence. As he looked more closely at who they'd be working with on the ground, he found a genuine charitable focus, not just a line item. Most companies mention giving back in a single sentence, a percentage of profits, donated somewhere unspecified. What Steve found after connecting with travel specialists showed up in more than one place, including videos describing specific work done with the communities they operate in.

"It wasn't just, 'We give a percentage of our profits back,'" Steve said. "It was the character behind it. You could tell it mattered."

That impression followed Steve and Deb into Cambodia during one of the trip's open days, when Deb visited Apopo, an organization that trains rats to detect landmines. Rats are light enough not to trigger a mine and, as Deb learned, considerably smarter than most people assume. She booked the visit herself, choosing what to do with unscheduled time exactly the way the itinerary was designed to let her.

"That's the kind of thing the flexible structure gave us," Deb said. "Half guided, half open to find things ourselves. Both halves felt like part of the same trip."

This was Steve and Deb's first trip with Zicasso, and they've already said it won't be the last. They're heading to France this fall, a return trip to the country where they first fell in love, and one they're comfortable planning themselves. After that, a safari is on the list in the next five years, something they want to do while they can still manage the more physically demanding parts of the experience. Further out, a multigenerational trip is taking shape for around 2028: three kids, two granddaughters, likely a group of at least 10, spanning a preteen to adults in their forties.

"We're pretty structured about the trips we want to take and the order we want to take them," Steve said. For the ones close to home, he builds that structure himself. For the ones where the margin for error is real, and the good options are easy to find, but hard to trust, he wants a specialist standing behind the choice.

If you've been putting off a destination because you don't know who to trust with the details, our specialists bring the vetting, the local relationships, and the on-the-ground support to make it the right experience. Explore our Vietnam and Cambodia vacations or begin with our Cambodia travel guide.