In an attempt to restore some
order to my home workspace I was clearing out some of the many travel-related
fliers currently balanced precariously on the end of my desk. As I cleared the pile I realised that I was
making some big assumptions about the sort of travel I was planning, and the
places I was thinking about travelling to.
Some of the rejected leaflets were about places in the "Don't want
to go there" category, others were in the "Been there, and have got
too many leaflets already" category.
A more interesting distinction was between the places where I thought I
needed support and assistance to travel (where I was keeping the leaflets), and
the places where I'm happy to plan and book independently, or to just to figure
out as I go.
On reflection, I think there are
four different sorts of travel, and although there are still some parts of the
world I've not been too, I've done trips in all four categories
Option
1. Wing It
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| Glacier National Park, Montana - hardly booked at all. |
Developed English-speaking
countries that I've been to before are the easiest ones for me to put into the
easy, independent, no-forward-planning-needed category. There are very few instances over the last 20
years where I've thought it necessary to 'buy in' expertise for trips in the UK
or to North America. In the case of the
USA or Canada, most recent trips have been work-related where itineraries were
business driven, but for leisure trips I've tended to make up itineraries on a
day-by-day basis. A few years ago we
spent three weeks travelling in the US Rocky Mountain states. We booked flights to Denver (which got messed
around by baggage chaos at Heathrow), a rental car (which expired halfway
through the trip), and the first two nights accommodation (one of which
evaporated on the back of UK airport chaos).
The rest of the trip was figured out as we went, the main agenda item
over dinner each evening was “where do we want go tomorrow?”, and the usual
post-dinner activity was to book the next motel. On a couple of mornings we rethought plans
based on the weather, and at one point we even talked about driving South until
the rain stopped. The unplanned style of
the trip was one of its many attractions, and the flexibility meant that when
we needed to factor in several hours in a car dealership in Whitefish, Montana while
they tried unsuccessfully to figure why our car had been reduced to having just
one openable door (not the driver’s door either) it wasn't a major
problem. I know some travellers like to
go a step further and don't even book their hotels in advance at all, this
doesn’t suit me - I prefer having a firm target at the end of the day, so I can
linger waiting for the light to be right for a photograph without worrying that
I’ll wind up needing to sleep in the car.
Option
2. Book Independently
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| Bergen, Norway - booked independently |
If I'm going to travel around
North America in peak travel season, or I need to be in particular places at
specific times, I do almost always book hotels in advance. I also tend to book almost all of my European
travel on this basis. I probably over-research
and over-plan at times, but my excuse for this is that I really enjoy travel
planning. I enjoy stitching together a
complex itinerary, and figuring what I can see and do, and how I'm going to do
it, and in Europe it is generally possible to rely on the timetable and
schedules that are published. A recent
example of a trip put together in this way was my Scandinavian trip in February. I spent two or three days in January deciding
where I wanted to go and how long I wanted to spend doing it, then used a
collection of different websites to book the entire trip. My booking strategy
was to start by booking the 'hardest' bits first. These were usually the most restricted bits,
for example where I wanted to be on a particular boat, train or plane. For me the most 'restricted' bit was the wish
to travel along the Norwegian coast on one of the old Hurtigruten boats. The next step was the flights and the long
distance trains where there is some flexibility. Step three was to figure out where to stay in
places with limited accommodation - for example little towns where there
weren't likely to be too many hotel rooms available. The final stage was booking hotel rooms in
big cities - where there was never going to be a shortage of accommodation, and
the only real reason for booking ahead was to get a good room rate. I didn't
get round to booking these until a couple of days before I travelled.
If it's practical, this in
definitely my preferred way to organise a trip!
Maybe one day I'll figure out how to make some money out of
choreographing trips this way for other people.
Option
3. Choose to let someone else sort it
The third category of travel involve
the trips where I either (i) enlist a specialist operator to tailor a trip to
my specification - and am prepared to let them do the legwork and be paid for
it! or (ii) book a pre-arranged trip. I tend to do these where I don't feel
that I know the region I’m planning to go to well enough, where I can't figure
out how to stitch together the itinerary I want or where I just don’t trust the
information I’ve got. When I think about
these sort of approaches I tend to think about trips to the Indian subcontinent
or to South America.
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| Sri Lanka, UK organisation by Wildlife Worldwide, ground agents Baurs |
We took this tailored itinerary approach
for our Sri Lanka trip last
year. We found a specialist wildlife tour
operator in the UK, and asked them to put together an
itinerary. In practise when you go down
this route you are relying on the operator knowing more than you (which isn't
always the case) and on the operators choice of a good local agent to sort
stuff out on the ground and actually make the trip happen. On our Sri Lanka trip I wasn't always
convinced that the UK agent knew much more than we did, but they did choose a
very good local agent.
One of the questions that I’m always
left with for a trip like this is whether it’s better to use a UK agent as your
main point of contact or if you should go directly to a local agent. I can think of two recent trips where I’ve
used UK agents who then used a local agent (Baurs in Sri Lanka and Blue Poppy
in Bhutan), and one example where I used a local agent directly (Falkland
Islands Holidays). The upside of using a
local agent directly is potentially getting more direct information about places
to see and maybe being able to negotiate costs, the downside is that you won’t
get things like ATOL protection or probably the ability to pay by instalments
or by credit card. And, if the local agent doesn’t have a presence in the UK at
all, sending money to them can involve an fascinating exploration of the international
banking system.
A simpler (and sometimes cheaper) version
of the tailored trip is one where you opt to join a pre-arranged trip with a
number of other people. One of the
attractions of this sort of trip is that you are probably going to be looked after
from dawn to dusk (and often later) each day.
This allows you, if you wish, to decommission your brain for the
duration of the trip. You get up when
you are told, get on the bus when you are told, and eat your meals when you are
told. If the trip is an escape from e.g. work pressures at home, this can be
good. On the flip side, I've found that
after few days there seems to be a herd culture that develops within the group
which appears to make decision making impossible. I still have vivid memories of an afternoon
in Kashgar in western China where our tour leader decided to give us an
afternoon “at leisure” with the instruction that we should find our own way
back to the hotel (a short walk we’d done with him several times) when we were
ready. This induced a level of panic
amongst several of our fellow travellers reminiscent of your average flock of
sheep. Only a few days earlier the same individuals had joined the trip as confident, thinking travellers!
Option
4. Hand-holding required
The final category of trip are to those places where it just isn't possible to travel independently. This can be
a consequence of geography (there really isn't any local infrastructure to book)
or of politics (local rules designed to prevent independent travel). I've done trips of both types. The polar voyages (to the Antarctic, South
Georgia or Svalbard) rely on travel groups being self-supporting, and short of
chartering and provisioning your own boat and hiring your own guides you have
no choice other than to join an organised trip (at least not at the budget
levels I live at).
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| Bhutan - UK organisation by Cox and Kings, ground agents Blue Poppy |
Some countries also put lots of
hurdles in place to ensure that they don't have independent travellers
wandering around. I retain a residual
suspicion of places where this is the case.
In China (when we visited Xinjiang) I felt this was all about trying to control
what visitors got to see and where they went, and it was clear that we were
being monitored most of the time. In
Bhutan we also needed to travel with local guides, but I felt that this was for
much more constructive reasons. The
government there have been trying to manage the growth of the tourist industry,
and attempting to prevent the tourist over-run that happened in Nepalese as the
tourist industry developed. In these places you don't really have the choice of how you put a trip together - the paperwork and bureaucracy involved with trying to travel independently is likely to be so overwhelming that you really have no option but to sign up with an experience operator.
So
what’s the best way to travel?
The answer is going to vary from
place to place. I’ve had great trips
using all four models. If I have the
choice, I’ll always opt for independent travel that I’ve planned and booked myself. There are some places, and times, that where
this isn’t realistic and in these cases I’ll opt for one of the other
approaches. Any travel gives you the potential to see and
explore new places and to meet new people.
In some cases travelling independently gives you options for exploring
places in your own unique way. In other
cases you need the support of either tour operators or fellow travellers to get
the most out of a new destination.
(This piece nearly took a dramatic
turn for the worse, when my spellchecker decided that my title was supposed to
be "Indecent Travel". I'll save that post for the post-watershed
blog)
Eventually we find our way through the station crowds, a mix of travellers and others apparently just milling around watching the travellers, and start to negotiate the complexities of the ticketing scheme. We identify a train. We decide on “non air-con”, previous experience telling us that air-con means you can’t see out of the windows. We even get a confirmed ticket for at least part of the journey. Success.
