What does it take to survive — and thrive — through the internet boom, the booking.com wave, and now the rise of agentic AI? I recently sat down with Kate Couling, co-founder of World Journeys, a bespoke travel agency operating out of New Zealand for over two decades. The answer she gave me wasn't about technology, pricing, or marketing. It came down to three words: ease, authenticity, and trust.
The longer we spoke, the more I realised these are not three independent ideas. They are a chain reaction. And what makes Kate's model so powerful is that she has not read about these principles in a textbook — she has built an entire business on them, refined over two decades, across some of the most complex and high-stakes customer journeys you can imagine.
When I asked Kate how World Journeys delivers ease of doing business, her answer was almost disarmingly simple. You call — a person answers. That person can help you, or immediately connects you with someone who can. No menus, no hold music, no chatbot asking you to rephrase your question. Just a human being who is ready to solve your problem from the very first second.
It sounds obvious. And yet most organisations — across every sector — have spent the last decade moving in the opposite direction, layering automation on top of automation and calling it efficiency. The result? Customers are having, on average, the worst experiences in a decade.
Kate's model makes sense of this immediately. Ease is not about technology or self-service. It is about removing friction at the human level — making the customer feel that getting help is effortless, and that the next step is always obvious. When you achieve that, everything else becomes possible. When you fail at it, nothing else matters.
The bar for ease has never been more important — or more missed.
This can also be seen in Forrester's 2025 Customer Experience Index — the most comprehensive CX benchmarking study in the US, covering 98,000 customers across 223 brands — delivered a stark verdict: the average ease of experience fell to 66%, its lowest point in a decade. Only 3% of companies are currently classified as "customer-obsessed." The gap between what organisations think they deliver and what customers actually feel has never been wider.
Here is something Kate told me that I have not been able to stop thinking about. Her clients do their research. They arrive informed. They have read the reviews, studied the destinations, compared the options. And yet — they still come back to World Journeys. Not because the agency is cheaper, or faster, or more sophisticated technologically. They come back because when they test the team's knowledge, the team knows more.
Every person at World Journeys has been to the destinations they recommend. They have stayed in those lodges, eaten in those restaurants, navigated those border crossings. They do not speak from a product brief — they speak from memory. And a well-researched customer can feel the difference within the first sixty seconds of a conversation.
"People can do as much research as they like. And as soon as they come back and say — actually, they were right — that is when trust follows. It just absolutely follows."
— Kate Couling, Co-founder, World Journeys
This is what the global data is now confirming at scale. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report on Brand Trust — surveying consumers across 15 global markets — found that trust is now equal to price and quality as a purchase consideration. Critically, 73% of consumers say their trust in a brand increases when it authentically reflects today's culture and experience. Only 27% say brand trust increases when a company ignores this and focuses solely on products. Authenticity is no longer a soft value. It is a commercial driver.
"I have clients who text me with just a destination — and that is all I get. But if I've done three, four, five trips for them before — I know what they like. And pretty much, we nail it first time."
Think about what Kate is describing there. A client sends a single message — no brief, no requirements, no specification. Just complete, unguarded reliance. That is not customer satisfaction. That is not even loyalty in the conventional sense. That is something rarer and far more valuable: the total elimination of the customer's anxiety about the outcome.
This is what trust looks like when it fully matures. And it does not arrive quickly. Kate earns it across multiple journeys, across years, through every small interaction that either confirms or undermines the belief that World Journeys will take care of everything — including things the client has not thought to ask about.
The data shows this kind of deep, earned trust is growing in commercial significance. The SAP Emarsys Customer Loyalty Index 2024 — surveying over 12,000 consumers globally — found that "true loyalty," defined as a deep emotional connection that drives active advocacy, has grown from 27% of consumers in 2021 to 34% in 2024. Meanwhile, loyalty driven purely by discounts and rewards is declining. Customers are increasingly choosing brands for reasons that go beyond price — and staying for reasons that no competitor can easily replicate.
These three pillars are sequential, not parallel. You cannot manufacture trust through a loyalty programme or a personalisation engine. You cannot project authenticity through better brand guidelines. You cannot skip ease and expect the customer to stay long enough for the relationship to deepen.
There is also a strategic choice embedded in Kate's model that the research supports but few organisations act on: World Journeys deliberately stayed small. They turn away destinations they cannot serve with genuine expertise. They keep their partner network tight enough to govern with real relationships. In a world obsessed with scale, restraint is itself a quality signal — and customers notice it.
It would be easy — and lazy — to read this framework as anti-technology. It is not. Forrester's 2024 research found that customer-obsessed organisations grow revenue 41% faster and retain customers 51% better than those that are not. AI will play a growing role in enabling that — streamlining processes, surfacing knowledge faster, reducing administrative friction. But Kate's clients are time-poor and risk-averse. They do not want to navigate an airline's IVR for four hours when something goes wrong in Botswana. They want a person who knows them and will handle it.
As AI removes friction from transactional experiences, the premium on genuine human expertise and care will only increase. The organisations that understand this will use AI to sharpen their people's capabilities — not replace the thread of human connection running through all three pillars.
This reflection draws from a rich conversation about bespoke travel, trust-based CX, managing complexity across global partners, and what luxury really means when you strip away the brand names. The full episode is available now on The CX Algorithm podcast.
Kate Couling is a co-founding director of World Journeys and has worked in the travel industry since her early twenties. Her career began the way the best ones often do — travelling the world on a budget, arriving into cities late at night with nothing pre-arranged, navigating bureaucracy and language barriers, and proving she could figure it out on her own.
That formative experience is the foundation of everything World Journeys does today. Kate and her fellow directors built the agency on a simple but powerful mission: to design journeys they would undertake themselves. Every itinerary is crafted from personal knowledge and direct experience — not brochures, not third-party reviews. The team has worked in the industry for over 30 years and continues to travel regularly, because at World Journeys, staying current is not optional — it is the job.
You can reach Kate and the World Journeys team at
Dr. Eslam Afifi is a customer experience and data leader whose work sits at the intersection of human behaviour, technology, and decision-making. His career spans multiple industries and regions, where he has helped organisations navigate complexity, design better experiences, and make sense of the growing role of data and AI in everyday decisions.
Curious by nature and sceptical of one-size-fits-all thinking, Eslam created The CX Algorithm to explore how customer-centricity actually works in practice. Through conversations with leaders from different contexts, the podcast unpacks the choices, trade-offs, and design decisions that quietly shape customer experience over time.
Follow The CX Algorithm for thoughtful conversations on experience, intelligence, and leadership — and a reminder that great CX is designed, not declared.
References
Forrester Research (2024). US Customer Experience Index. Annual benchmarking covering 98,000 US consumers across 223 brands and 13 industries.
Edelman (2025). Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Trust, From We to Me. 15-market global survey on brand trust, authenticity, and purchase behaviour.
SAP Emarsys (2024). Customer Loyalty Index. Survey of 12,000+ global consumers on the nature and evolution of brand loyalty.
Emplifi (2024). Consumer Experience Report. Data on experience thresholds, churn triggers, and loyalty behaviour.
Forrester Research (2025). Brand and Customer Experience Together Power Growth. Revenue impact of aligning CX and brand experience.
KPMG (2024–2025). Customer Experience Excellence Report. US consumer rankings including Patagonia's 16-place rise to 3rd nationally.
Salesforce (2024). State of the Connected Customer. Executive vs. consumer trust gap data.
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