Most trip planning hands you a single itinerary and hopes you like it. I do the opposite: I research your destination properly, then build you a private interactive site showing ten or more genuinely different ways to travel it — so you choose with the whole picture in front of you.
Everything below arrives as one private website — on your phone on the train, on the laptop while you argue about it, and printable when you want it on paper.
Accurate coastlines and borders drawn to order, with every stop plotted from verified coordinates. Pan, zoom, and switch between routes to watch the shape of the trip change.
Not one plan with variations. Genuinely different trips — a stationary one, a fast one, a coastal one, a mountain one — each committing to its own idea so the choice is meaningful.
What to do there, what to eat, what kind of place to stay, and pre-filled accommodation searches with your actual dates already in them.
Door-to-door travel times including the transfers everyone forgets, realistic costs, and a straight answer on whether a rail pass is worth it for your route.
What the weather actually does then. What closes. Which festival you'll hit or miss. Which day of the week that museum is shut. Season-specific, not evergreen filler.
Every route says who it suits and what it costs you. I tell you when somewhere is beautiful but overrun, or authentic but two buses a day.
Twenty-one nights in Japan, built around three hotel bookings that couldn't move. This is a genuine client deliverable, not a mock-up.
Three bookings were already paid for, leaving two awkward gaps: a four-night loop out of Tokyo, and a seven-night one-way run from Kyoto back to Tokyo.
I researched 203 candidate areas, then designed thirteen routes to fill those gaps — from a five-base slow trip to a nine-base alpine crossing.
One form: where, when, how long, what you're into, what's already booked, and how much moving around you can stand. Ten minutes.
Regions, hot springs, coastlines, cities, transit, weather for your exact dates, festivals, closures. Hundreds of sources, and I check the load-bearing claims twice.
Each route commits to a distinct idea, then gets reviewed against your constraints — night counts, real travel times, day-of-week closures, your fixed bookings.
A private URL, live within a fortnight. Compare, argue, pick one. Revisions included, and the file is yours forever even if I disappear.
I take nothing from hotels or booking sites, so there is no incentive to send you anywhere except where you should go. One flat fee, and that is the end of it.
I'm new at this, and I'd rather earn a reputation than pretend to one. The first eight Atlas projects are $445 instead of $890, in exchange for an honest testimonial and permission to show your site as a public example. Same work, same revisions, same call. When the eight are gone, they're gone.
For comparison: established Japan specialists charge $1,600 for a single three-week itinerary delivered as a document, and agencies that offer an interactive map reserve it for tiers starting around $2,750. I'm deliberately below that while I build a portfolio.
My name is Nicholas Johnsen. Wayfare Studio is me — not an agency, not a team, one person in Oslo who studies at NTNU and builds these in the hours around it.
It started with my own trip. Three weeks in Japan, three hotel bookings already paid for, and two awkward gaps left to fill. Planning it properly turned into a research project, and the tool I built to make sense of the options was better than anything I could find to buy. So I made it something other people could have.
I am not a travel agent. I book nothing on your behalf, I hold no inventory, and I take no commission from hotels or booking platforms. The only thing I am optimising for is whether your trip is good — there is no hotel quietly paying me to send you there.
What I am unusually good at is the boring part: checking whether that bus actually runs on a Tuesday, whether the beach still has lifeguards in September, whether the connection you have been sold really has eleven minutes to change platforms with two suitcases. Most of a good trip is that kind of detail, and most planning skips it.
Oslo, Norway. I work in English and Norwegian, and take a small number of projects at a time so each one gets the research it needs.
Ten minutes on the form, and you'll hear back from me within two working days — including an honest note if I think you don't need me.
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