The magic of "mystery trips" – How one travel advisor keeps clients guessing

In an industry built on meticulously-planned itineraries, Louise Drouin has built a reputation on something far more elusive: not knowing.

With more than 40 years of experience in the travel business – today, she runs two agencies in Quebec: one in Drummondville, another in Sorel-Tracy – Drouin has perfected the art of the “surprise trip,” a high-end, high-trust experience where clients hand over thousands of dollars without the faintest clue where they’re going.

No Googling the hotel. No stalking departure boards. No pre-trip bragging rights about a Michelin-star restaurant. Just…mystery.

And that’s exactly the point.

Selling the unknown

Drouin started hosting surprise trips 16 years ago. Her first one? A 50-pax getaway to Provence, in southern France, at Club Med Opio to mark her 50th birthday (of course, none of her guests knew they were going there until they got there).

The guestlist? Loyal clients who, over time, had become close friends of Drouin through years of travelling with her – some of them having travelled with her more than 40 times.

They’re not exactly casual vacationers. These are seasoned, well-heeled, French-speaking explorers – primarily from Quebec, but also from Ontario and New Brunswick – who could book any luxury trip they want.

Instead, they choose to surrender control entirely.

“It’s kind of crazy,” Drouin admits. “This is not a $2,000 trip. My clients spend a lot of money, and they follow me around the world. I want to please them with something really special.”

So, she decided to flip the script.

“When you buy a trip, you have the program, you can go on the internet and look at the hotel. Whereas on mystery trips, all you have is the surprise. The good part is not knowing what you’re going to see.”

Again, these aren’t budget adventures. Drouin’s surprise trips can cost $16,000 to $17,000 per person – and that’s before flights in some cases.

And yet, they sell quickly. “Once I put one on sale, it's crazy at my office. It’s sold in a matter of hours.”

Guarding the secret

She goes to extraordinary lengths to guard the secret, designing each mystery trip herself, with almost no one in her offices (a team of nearly 30) privy to the itinerary.

“The worst part of a surprise is if people find out,” she says. “People have fun trying to guess.” 

But not just anyone can come along for the ride. Drouin curates her groups with the precision of a casting director.

There’s a questionnaire potential guests have to fill out, and in the end, Drouin is the one who accepts them or not.

It’s not about exclusivity, it’s about chemistry. The questionnaire asks about people’s abilities, where they’ve travelled in the past, their interest in ships, if they enjoy cold climates, hot climates.

“This way I know I’m travelling with people who want to be there,” she says.

What do travellers actually know before departure? Drouin may suggest what clothes to pack, but that’s where it ends. “They don’t know where they’re going,” she says.

From there, Drouin turns the entire journey into a kind of theatrical production. There are pre-trip parties, decoy clues, and just enough misdirection to keep even the most seasoned guessers off balance.

“I always try to trick them,” she says, delighted. “They’ll look at the flight schedule and try to guess where they're going.”

The big reveal

One particularly mischievous move? Hosting a cocktail reception at a Marriott airport hotel—letting guests believe they were about to depart—only to send them off to bed without a hint of where they’d be heading the next day.

For Drouin, it’s about staging moments. Even once guests arrive in destination, they still don’t know what’s ahead. They discover their itinerary each day, as it unfolds. 

Take a surprise trip to Dubai, for instance. “We had a private charter boat and we sailed in front of the Atlantis hotel,” Drouin explains. “I got everybody together to take a group picture, people remarked how beautiful the hotel was, and then I said, ‘Your luggage is already in your room. We’re staying there.’”

Cue collective “wows!” and disbelief.

Or the time she orchestrated an elaborate ruse involving a “tour guide” aboard a bus in Guatemala who was actually a ship captain. “He started talking about a beautiful Ponant ship being in town… and then surprised the group, telling everyone they were going on a Ponant cruise,” Drouin says.

During the pandemic, when outbound travel came to a near-halt, she surprised clients with a trip to Chibougamau, a lakeside town, way up in Northern Quebec.

She flew everyone in on Air Creebec, a Cree-owned regional airline. “That was one of my best ones. It was beautiful. Nobody had ever been there,” she says.

It’s part travel, part magic trick. And while surprise trips sound mildly anxiety-inducing, Drouin argues that’s exactly why it works. There’s no overplanning, no checklist. Just the present moment.

“One of my clients told me: ‘Louise, it's like being in front of a Christmas tree and you have a box to open, and you don't know what's going to be in the box.’”

That childlike anticipation is addictive. “When you don't know, you enjoy your day, day by day,” she says. “It has completely changed the way people travel.”

Built on trust

Of course, none of this works without trust. Deep, unwavering trust. “You have to trust the person behind the trip, for sure,” says Drouin, who now limits her surprise trips to roughly 20 guests

Fortunately, she’s spent decades earning exactly that. Her agency is intensely personal. “My travel business is from the heart. My customers know they can call me and I will answer the phone,” she says.

She hosts biannual brunches, personally welcoming hundreds of past clients at the door, where she shares her upcoming itineraries – traditional, non-surprise (but still very exotic) trips, created by her, spanning the globe, from Africa to river cruises to polar expeditions (her personal favourite).

She helped raise money for her tour guide partners around the world during the pandemic. She remembers faces, names and stories.

“You feel good when people trust you,” she says.

But Drouin, whose next surprise trip is scheduled for this September, is the first to admit her mystery adventures aren’t for the faint of heart – or the control-obsessed.

But for those willing to let go? “After people do a mystery trip, they say, ‘Wow. I miss it,’” she says.

That might be the most surprising part of all: in a world where travellers demand more information, more customization, and more certainty, Louise Drouin has built a thriving niche on the exact opposite.

This article originally ran on May 6, 2026, as part of PAX's annual "10 Most Fascinating Travel Advisors" list to mark Travel Advisor Appreciation Day. To read the full feature, click here. 

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