Planning your journey.
We do not like pre-packaged tours and avoid them whenever we can. Almost all of our travel has been arranged by personal contact with local tour operators in the country we intend to visit or ‘on the fly’ when we arrive.
We do this as we prefer to pace ourselves and often find that a tour itinerary is always very restricting and the success of an organised group tour is often at the mercy of fellow travellers. Naturally the tour operator will want to show you everything that any particular location has to offer which is what their clients demand but this can lead to lengthy visits to aspects that may not be of great interest to you or very short visits to places you want to spend more time. Finding the balance is not easy and tour guides have a tough time in catering to all the group’s requirements which can also lead to unpleasantness amongst fellow travellers. We prefer to take group guided tours on an ad hoc basis rather than start and end our journey with one group. There are many places where it’s a good idea to take guided tours and these we do with regularity as it saves time and usually money rather than trying to do a tour under your own steam and argue with taxi drivers or battle to communicate with the locals. We have also found that local guides are generally interesting people who impart a lot of knowledge of their culture and traditions and in a lot of cases tours organised this way through say the tour desk of the hotel or via a local tour operator are more intimate and much smaller than a large coach load.
Being an independent traveller also gives you an opportunity to re-visit a place that your day tour may have only spent a short time at due to the limited time available and the number of attractions on the schedule. This happened to us in St Petersburg where our guided tour of the city spent a fraction of the time we needed at the Hermitage. Once we knew the ropes and with some guidance from the hotel concierge we were able to go back to the Hermitage on another day during our stay in the city.
In our early travel planning we relied heavily on Lonely Planet and Eye Witness Travel guides and consumed these publications avidly before setting off. Today we have become computer literate and the internet has made travel planning that much easier and a lot of our research and pre-planning is done this way. The digital age has also made it easier to carry around devices like i pads, e-books and laptops that can store all you should know about your destination, gone are the days when you need to hump around heavy travel guides. The internet is great for booking flights and accommodation and we always make our internet bookings direct with the provider and not via a hotel or airline internet agency, it is not only cheaper but booking direct with the provider is more flexible and less problem when you need to make any changes as often happens with flight delays and so on. We had a good example of this once when we pre-booked accommodation through an internet booking agency for a hotel in Kathmandu. Due to an unfortunate change in schedule we needed to alter our accommodation booking by one day. The internet agency charged us a penalty for doing so and when we arrived at the hotel we found that all changes/cancellations made with the hotel outside 24 hours are not subject to any fee despite the booking agency advising us that a fee was payable even if changes were made outside the 24 hour window. We managed to get a refund from the booking agency but only with the help of the hotel which had muscle as they are an International group. A smaller establishment would not have had the same clout.
Whilst we have found the tripadvisor website a great resource for information on hotels we would caution taking everything written by travellers too literally as any negative comments are based on one persons experience and may have been out of the control of the establishment concerned at the time of the visit. If you’re worried about getting the room overlooking a noisy street or next to the bar or not getting the sea view you want then ask the hotel specifically through their ‘contact us’ page to assure you that they will meet your requirements before you commit to the booking. You will then have it in writing should things not work out when you check in.
Another great tip if you’re worried about the hotels location and feel that the publicity material may be mis-leading or hiding something about the location that they don’t want you to know then look for the establishment on ‘Google Earth’ and you will then be able to see precisely where the hotel is positioned. We were looking at booking a seemingly wonderful resort hotel in Mexico’s Yucatan once at a price we couldn’t believe, but when we put it on Google Earth we found it was adjacent to a massive development project and the hotel concerned was the only completed building in the vicinity with no surrounding infrastructure. The hotel had not stated this on their website and nor had its images shown this.
