Guides
Five guides, in the order a real trip needs them.
These are the questions buyers ask before anyone books a flight: how to plan the trip around the product rather than the airport, what to check once you are standing on the floor, how to tell a real factory from a trading office, when a visit is simply the wrong tool, and what filming permission actually takes. Each one is written to be used, not skimmed.
What is in each guide
Grouped by the stage of the trip you are at. Two of them sit in the same cluster on purpose — supplier choice is the question people get wrong most often.
How a guide differs from the rest of the site
A guide explains how to think about a problem. It does not become a service page halfway down, and it does not pretend every question has a clean answer.
- Written from the floor, not a deskThe checks listed are the ones that have actually caught a problem on a visit — a licence that does not match the address, a tooling store that does not exist — rather than a generic supplier checklist.
- They say when the answer is noWe do not guarantee entry to a specific named factory, and filming permission belongs to the factory, not to us. Where the honest answer is "maybe", the guide says "maybe".
- Filming has a real lead timePermission is requested in writing and routed through the factory owner. Under ten working days the honest expectation is often a refusal.
- They stop where the work startsA guide tells you what to look at. If you would rather have someone walk the floor and document it, that is a hosted visit — linked from every page, never sold inside the guide itself.
Order
Read them in the order the problems arrive.
The guides are ordered by stage, not by importance. Skipping ahead is fine once you know which stage you are really at — most people think they are further along than they are.
- Start with planning if nothing is bookedCluster first, route second, meetings third. Nearly every wasted trip described to us went wrong at step one: someone flew to a city because it had a good airport, then found out their product is made two provinces away.
- Start with factory vs trading company if you already have quotesQuotes tell you very little until you know who wrote them. This one is short, and it changes how you read everything else sitting in your inbox.
- Start with visit vs audit vs inspection if something has gone wrongThe three get used interchangeably and are not interchangeable. Which one you need depends on the question you are actually asking, and booking the wrong one wastes the money either way.
Guides explain; they do not do the job for you. When the checking itself is what you need, that is a hosted visit — the service pages break that down by task — and when it is footage you want rather than evidence, it isfilming coordination. The two pages most people open side by side are thevisit checklist and thescorecard: one tells you what to look at, the other gives you somewhere to write it down before you forget.