The Travel Independently Blog

What is your idea of a great trip?

Do you like to travel with others?

Do you enjoy group activities?

Do you like to have someone tell you what you are seeing?

Are you content to be taken from place to place with little or no time to wander on your own?

Do you like to have your history in short capsules?

Do you prefer to be taken to places to shop that have are fixed prices rather than shopping in local places where you need to bargain?

Do you like to have someone else take care of the details of a trip like choosing hotels and restaurants?

Do you like to choose foods from buffets where you can pick and choose want you want from western and local foods, the local foods spiciness toned down for the western palate?

Do you enjoy a trip that gives you a brief introduction to many places rather than giving you a longer experience of fewer places?

If so, group travel is for you.  You will likely enjoy tours put together by hundreds of companies.  Look at the itinerary and see if it covers what you want to do/see, check on how many people the tour takes at a time, and see what the transport and accommodations are.

Do you find that researching and planning a trip is part of the pleasure?

Do you prepare for a trip by reading not only guidebooks, but also history and fiction about your destination?

Do you like to do things on your own?

Do you like time to explore, wander, talk with locals even if you share very little language?

Do you like to shop in local markets, bargaining with locals and finding unusual items?

Do you like to explore places in depth?  Do you want more than just a walk-through of a site?

Do you like to try out new foods?

Do you like to choose your own hotels and restaurants?

Are you comfortable learning the public transportation system in a new city?

Do you like to go at your own pace?  Does it drive you crazy to wait for others or be hurried along?

If so, independent travel is for you.  This site can help you be a savvier independent traveler!

Technorati Tags: Independent Travel, travel tours, vacation tours

The difference in experience between having a guide and not having a guide can be vast.

Which is better?  Well, there is no hard and fast answer to this.  It depends on you, your level of knowledge about a place, your level of comfort in interacting with people when you have only a few words of a common language, and what you want out of a particular experience.

For instance, when I visited the temples at Angkor, we decided not to use a guide.  I’d been reading about Angkor for years, decades, in fact.  When I first started reading about Angkor it wasn’t clear that it would be safe to visit Angkor in this lifetime.  When Cambodia opened up, I was delighted and we planned our trip.  Yes, we were able to find the relief of the “churning of the sea of milk” (something many people cite as what they wouldn’t have been able to do on their own), we were able to arrange for our driver to drop us off at one entrance and pick us up at another so we could see areas many people miss and so on.

Perhaps the most special part of not having a guide was having time alone at some of the temples, listening to the silence at a small temple, the giant stones tumbled around the walls, or doing a walking meditation at Angkor Wat just after sunrise, with the whole complex to ourselves and a few quiet monks,

When we visited Sri Lanka, there were many places we really appreciated having a guide.  Polowarnua was a highlight for us.  Our guide there made the ruins come alive.  Showing us inscriptions and telling us the tales behind them, pointing out unique features, and helping us get an overview of the whole site made such a difference.  This was an instance when very little is available about Sri Lankan history and archaeology in our country.

We needed the knowledge to appreciate the place.  A friend of mine later visited Sri Lanka and their driver told them they didn’t need a guide at Polowarnua.  Instead, accompanied them into the ruins, but the extent of the knowledge he transmitted was “that was a palace” or “that was a temple.”” For me, Polowarnua was a highlight of the trip, for my friend, the ruins were simply ruins.

We never use a guide in Bangkok, for instance, preferring to find our own way, interact with locals, and discover our own favorites.  In part this is because we have been there many times, but we have also chosen no guide in cities when we visited the first time.  Some people feel they get to know the people if they have a guide.  But my experience is that people who chose to have a guide get to know the guide and the guide mediates all of their interactions with locals.

I’d much rather talk with locals myself, even if there are parts we can’t translate.  I also enjoy using local public transport – I feel like it gives me more of a sense of the city and the people.  Guides rarely take you on public transport (unless you’ve made a special request), so you move through a city in your hermetically sealed car, never touching the street until you arrive at a designated destination.

Some of my favorite travel stories are about communications with people when whom I shared only a few words of a common language… bargaining with a Touarg man in Adz in my schoolgirl French and his few phrases, talking with a Buddhist nun in Bangkok about voting in our presidential election, learning about jade carvings from an old man in Taipei.  Those are experiences that would have been transformed (and not for the better) by a guide.

In Luang Prabang, we were shopping at the weavers coop and having a wonderful time.  A man approached us and asked if we wanted his guide to translate for us.  We agreed, and the guide translated a question we had and the response from the weaver.  I felt sad after the interaction, as it felt like it broke the alliance we had with the weaver, the alliance to understand each other and deal fairly with each other in spite of having no common language.  I felt more separate from her for the translation.

So when the question of hiring a guide comes up, think about what you need and want in a situation.  Guides are often easy to hire on the spot.  Unless there is some special reason to hire a guide in advance, I’d recommend you try to go it alone first or to hire a guide once you get to a place.

Technorati Tags: hiring a guide, Independent Travel, traveling independently

I’ve heard stories from several friends recently about using a US based travel agent to arrange travel in Asia.  One friend was headed to Vietnam and Cambodia.  She has a long-time travel agent who booked all the flights and hotels for her plus guides in each place.  For two weeks, she paid US$12,000.  She could have done the same trip for half the price by doing her own booking and deciding on guides or drivers as she arrived at each place.

If you want the convenience of having someone else do the booking for you, fine.  But the current price structure for travel agents is such that you don’t know just how much you are paying for the convenience.  And often, people who book guides ahead like this don’t really know if they will need a guide somewhere.  For instance, she booked a guide for two days in Hanoi.  Most people get to Hanoi and realize they don’t need a guide at all in the city.  And if you want a guide, good guides are easily hired – and for less than half the price of booking ahead through a US travel agent.

Another couple was going to Thailand.  The couple had their travel agent price out the trip for them – just flights and accommodation.  Accommodation alone came to US$5000 per person.  My friend was shocked.  Yes, they’d opted for a 4-night stay at a very nice and very pricey resort that had individual villas with plunge pools, but the price seemed out of line in terms of the reports they’d heard from other travelers.

I suggested they take a look at what they would have to pay if they booked the hotels themselves.  They were amazed to see that the price for the two of them was US$5080 – about half of what the travel agent wanted to charge them.

That said, there are times when using a travel agent can be very helpful.  Some times I use a Thailand-based travel agent to book flights that are not book-able online or in cases where he could get a better price by buying in Bangkok.  He does not charge any extra for the booking, but simply collects the commission from the airline.  It’s easy, it’s convenient, and it’s fair.  If he wanted to charge me something for the service, that would be fine with me – as long as the charges were clear and up-front.

When we traveled to Sri Lanka, we found that using a local agent assured us of getting the accommodations we wanted and it allowed us to have a contract with a company to supply a car and driver.  If you have a contract with a company and there are problems with either the car or the driver, the company can make a change for you on the road.

If you have contracted with an individual driver, you have no recourse.  We still did all of the research on where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do, and the agency accommodated all of our requests.  I checked the websites of the individual places we stayed and found that the mark-up by the travel agency was minimal; mostly they made their money from commissions paid to them by the hotels.

Burma (Myanmar) is another place where it is often helpful to have a local travel agent.  But for most places, a local agent is not needed.

Many times people use a travel agent out of habit or because they are afraid they don’t know what to do.  It is true that it takes more time and effort to research exactly where you want to go, what you want to do, and where you want to stay, but doing your research assures that you’ll get the trip you want.  Whether you are using a travel agent or even taking a group tour, you’ll get much more out of your trip if you are prepared.  So reading about your destination – guidebooks, history, travel essays, fiction – all will enhance your enjoyment of a place.

Doing that kind of preparation makes it easy to plan and book your trip.  Add internet travel boards to the mix and you’ll get lots of recommendation for places to stay, restaurants, etc.  And travel boards are often good places to learn about internet hotel booking sites.

Technorati Tags: hiring car and driver, Independent Travel, making hotel reservations, travel agent, travel independently