Travel and Leisure

A holiday is supposed to be a relaxing time. It is supposed to be a reward for hard work throughout the year and a good opportunity to spend time with friends and family. There should be no stress associated with your holiday.

Unfortunately, for many people, organising a holiday can be a very stressful time. For many people it becomes such an issue that they end up avoiding organising a holiday altogether.

Organising a holiday need not be stressful. There are things that you can do to make it easier. That is the purpose of this article. Below I will outline three tips for holiday planning.

Make sure you book everything early. You need to make sure that you book everything early. A lot of stress for people comes from the fact that they leave everything until the last minute so that they feel like they are always in a rush.

You can save money by booking everything online. Holiday costs are another stress factor for many people. They don’t know whether they can afford a holiday so avoid booking one altogether. If you want to save money, you need to make sure that you book your holiday online. There are a lot of savings to be found online. You can book your flights, hotels and travel insurance without even leaving the house. You may also be able to book tickets to sporting events and concerts before you go

Make a list and don’t forget anything. If you want to avoid as much stress as possible, you should make a to do list of what you need to do before you go. You need to book everything, get your travel insurance and find someone to look after your errands at home. If you make a list you are less likely to forget things and then your holiday will be less stressful.

Planning your holiday need not be stressful. Follow the tips that I have mentioned above and you will have a much better experience on you holiday. It will be more relaxing and you will come back more refreshed.

Holidays and short breaks, hotels and travel are notorious for institutionalised acts of discrimination against the undeserving: Singles are often penalised for not having a partner. As if being a wallflower is not bad enough some hotels load the bill when singles check in at reception.

Before I check in I check out and here’s the rub. A London hotel for a two night package charges £235 per person. If you are travelling alone you need to add £90 more than the guy next door who brought ‘a friend’ along. The Royal Garden Hotel adds £100 to the single’s bill and is far from being alone. It is common practice.

Hotels respond to criticism by claiming they lose the charge on the partner’s bill. It makes sense then to book a hotel that charges by the room rather than by the person. Either that or bring along a friend. Hotels that charge extra for singles might be a little more ethical if the extra fee was levied only when the hotel is fully booked and they are turning couples away.

Pick a Partner

My cheeky suggestion that they put aside a reception area where singles can relax, chat up and choose someone to share their room with was not well received. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all.

The same applies for those who fancy a sea cruise. My eyes lit up when I spotted a three-night Norwegian cruise for a paltry £99. Rubbing my hands in expectation, I looked forward to exploring the fjords by day and propping up the bars at night. It was then that the penny dropped; lots of them. The fare was based on two sharing a two-berth cabin.

As we move into the third millennium’s second decade one of the biggest spending consumer groups are the singles. In the holiday trade there are web-based tour operators whose modus operandi is to target the singles. This makes subsequent socialising legitimate: No one is going to be offended if Sally is chatted up or Jeanette flutters her eyelashes at Gareth as their single status can be presumed.

For singles this is far preferable to going on an ordinary package tour. Who wants to be Billy-no-mates in the restaurant or worse, fall in love with someone else’s spouse or partner? It rather spoils the holiday for everyone.

Exotic Locations

I scour the specialist tour operators’ websites who want singles to join them on trips to exotic locations, seductive surroundings; perfect settings for a holiday of which more than memories might last a lifetime. With considerable panache I conduct a search through the appropriately named worldwide web.

Whoa! Singles! Have Fun. Meet new Friends! Great Deals £895 for 7-nights skiing? Look at that price again! That is budget? Anyway who needs white snow when you can have white sandy beaches with palm trees? Grenada seems to tick all the right boxes for carefree philanders like me. Sure there are a few spa and gym temptations thrown in but £1,899 for seven nights? Maybe to compensate I will find someone rich and famous to chat with in the restaurant or bars: a premier division football player, a movie star, or top model? I am beginning to cotton on.

Are these solo holidays strategically located, imaginatively planned and priced to provide an opportunity for single ladies seeking a supra-rich boyfriend; maybe James Bond? After all, at £2,000 for a seven day break in the Bahamas one is unlikely to be rubbing shoulders with the crowd that frequent the local bistros and bars.

Gold Digging Vampires

This might then be the ideal opportunity for me to meet an upwardly mobile model, a gold-digging vamp, or a celebrity wannabe willing to invest a night in fame and fortune? However the thought of explaining across the breakfast table that my runabout is a fifteen year old shopping trolley and I am an under-resourced hack pours cold water on that scheme-dream. I have no wish to have a bowl of cornflakes emptied over my lap after a night of unbridled debauchery.

I discover a tour company specialising in singles holidays which seemed more reasonable. This one was going to set me back £235 for a week hamming up the bon vivant in Tenerife. Ever the restless traveller I moved on further to a rival company. I gulped: £500 plus for a week’s stay in Turkey did not strike me as competitive. That is until I checked out solo.com; they offer 4 nights in Salzburg for £829 or a 4-night winter break in Italy for £429.

Clearly singles are being charged double with bells on. It was as clear as Bahamian waters that holidays exclusively tailored for singles translates into high price vacations. Possibly the thinking behind it is that singles, most of them without dependents, have plenty of disposable income. The obvious solution was to find a partner as two travellers can obviously travel far cheaper than one. Is there anyone out there?

Zoos have been one of the favorite activities for Americans for a long time starting with the very first zoo being the Philadelphia Zoo in 1859. Since then, most states have at least one zoological park but there are some that stand above and beyond the rest of them with extra features like a touch tank, bird houses, safari and water fountains and parks. This article will mention the top 4 zoos in the United States and the reasons they stand above the others. The ones that made the top four are the Columbus Zoo, San Diego Zoo, Lion Country Safari and the Phoenix Zoo.

The Columbus Zoo has also been around since the late 1800′s making it the second oldest zoo in the country. This had always been a nice zoo, but it completely changed when the famous animal trainer, Jack Hanna took over the direction of the zoological park. He changed many things about it with great improvements and now it houses one of the largest animal collections in the world with over 7,000 animals at the zoo. Whatever type of animal you can imagine seeing, is probably at the Columbus Zoo in Ohio in addition to a water park, amusement park and golf resort making it a great place to visit.

The San Diego Zoo has always been at the top of the list for best zoos not only in the US but in the world. It is huge and has a great variety of animals including their well known Giant Panda exhibit. This zoo is also known for their conservation and protection of animal efforts and is considered the most modern of all zoos. They were the first to come up with cage less exhibits for the animals in an open air kind of setting that allowed the animals to live in an area closer to their natural place of origin.

The number three zoo on the top zoo list is the Lion Country Safari in West Palm Beach, Florida. This is a bit of a different experience for visitors as you enter the place in your own car and travel along a five mile road that takes you by many different animals. Some of the animals like the lions and chimpanzees have to be behind fenced areas for their safety and the motorists but other animals like zebras and giraffes roam freely and sometimes hold up the cars from continuing on the road. After you complete this off road exhibit, you then enter another part of the park called Safari World.

The fourth best zoo is the Phoenix Zoo in Arizona. This is the largest non-profit zoo in the country and is over 125 acres big with more than 1200 animals. This zoo has a unique design with all of the animals’ exhibits being on 4 long trails and divided up into categories such as the native wildlife of Arizona. They also allow rollerblades and bicycles in the zoo and they can be taken on all of the trails to experience the zoo on wheels.

Every wondered how your travel agent seems to accrue such an exhaustive knowledge of every destination in the world? It doesn’t matter where you want to go or what you want to see they will have been there and done it before – or at least they’ll say they have. The secret behind their apparent super human level of knowledge is the huge strides made recently in travel training.

Travel training is the process by which any professional within the industry quickly gains comprehensive knowledge of destinations and different parts of the business. They can choose from a range of different courses and modules to learn anything they need to know.

For example, let’s say you want to go to Australia. Depending on what you need you can find a course to suit you. It won’t just be a bland digest of basic information – the kind you can easily glean off the net. It’ll be specifically targeted at what they need. The course can tell them about the country, its nature, its people and attractions. It can help the agent convey to the customer the true experience of heading down under. It can offer business tips and advice on the best way to sell the destination.

The result is a win win for all concerned. The customer gets added service value, the agent received more commission and the travel training provider collects another cheque. Everyone’s happy.

But is this the kind of thing we really want to see in our world. We live in an age of instant information. Thanks to the marvel of Google and other search engines everyone can become an apparent expert on any subject in the world. Want to know about the riches of Egypt? Give me ten minutes and access to a computer and I can tell you everything you need to know.

The result is an end to learning replaced by the ability to parrot facts and figures. For instance, I recently spoke to a journalist who shall for his own sake remain nameless. He’d just written a detailed travel guide to Portugal. The only problem was he’d never been. No matter – a few quick scans of the web and he was up to speed. I wonder if I’ll ever trust a travel article again.

So travel training doesn’t give instant knowledge, but it offers enough for the agent to do his or her job more effectively and can you really quibble with that?