Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

Most of the booking websites provide a mechanism for guests to comment on and score the performance of the accommodation which they’ve used recently.

In most cases the comments are approved by the booking site before they’re published so you only get to see the relatively sensible ones as they weed out those that are from another planet. For example, the commentary that we received a year ago that criticised the “ancient boxy hairdryer” in the bathroom; in fact it was a reasonably modern room heater. Or the couple that wrote quite an extensive critique of their stay that rarely touched base with reality and for which it turned out that all their problems stemmed from them not having changing the time on their watch.

However, as well as the commentary there’s generally a scoring system in place which can sometimes have quite bizzare numerical effects. For example, on one site we’ve the vast majority of scores 7 and over yet because of two 2.5s from a single group we end up with an overall 5. It’s scoring bias like that which makes a nonsense of the scoring. In a large hotel with hundreds of comments one or two low scores disappear of course but when you’ve only a few dozen comments just one disgruntled customer can really throw the overall result.

That’s question that many in the travel trade would dearly like to know the answer to but, as always with such questions, it’s not possible to get a really definitive answer to it in advance.

Holidays and vacations are discretionary expenses which means that they’re among the first to be cut back on when times get tough and this seems to be one of those particular times. However, many people don’t want to skip a vacation so what you could see in this area are people taking shorter vacations, downgrading the accommodation that they stay in, and probably using local or short-haul trips rather than heading for long haul destinations.  We’ve already noticed that this year with the poor exchange rate encouraging Americans to book via a hostel site rather than via a hotel booking site and that will likely become much more common in the coming year.

Added to the problem of getting the money saved or available on credit is the exchange rate problem for overseas holidays. We’ve seen the pound/euro rate moving from around 1.30 to more like 1.00 in a very short period of time ie a holiday from the UK to Europe has risen in price by around 30% even if the base price remained the same (which, of course, it rarely does). Throw in hikes in price from the airlines and that means a substantial rise in the cost of your holiday.

So what will the outcome be? Well, on our listing sites we’ve seen the traffic drop around 80% compared to the same period last year which implies a very substantial drop in bookings in 2009 for many people. Notable too is the increase in the number of adverts we’re taking onboard which implies that the owners are ramping up their advertising early presumably because they’ve had fewer than usual booking enquiries. However, even if both those indications are pointing towards much lower bookings in the year to come it could be that people are simply postponing their bookings until the economic picture clears up.

In reality I suspect that there will be a lot of last-minute bookings in 2009 but that overall there will be a lot fewer people going on holiday which could mean some great discounts on the more expensive holidays if you’re prepared to wait. Unfortunately, it’ll also mean that your choice will be much more limited in 2010 as many travel related businesses will be closing up in the coming year.

Although we’ve quite a selection of flight options from airports locally, it’s not always so easy to manage to get from A to B when you’ve got to go through C to do it.

Our closest airport is all of 20 minutes away so is definitely our preferred departure point but it’s one that we just can’t seem to manage for a flight to Belfast next week. Flights go to the Birmingham, Stansted and Brussels but all arrive just after the last flight to Belfast from those airports would have just departed.

Next choice is Gerona which has a massive range of departures. However, that’s about 90 minutes drive from us so in practical terms departures before 10am aren’t really that viable and unfortunately the flights out leave more like 6am which would mean a 2am departure from home for us ie not really a runner.

Final choice seems to be Barcelona which has the big plus point that it’s a direct non-stop flight but the downer that it’s about two and a half hours drive to get there. Having said that, the even departure time is close to perfect.

I was leafing through the categories and funnily enough though I write a fair bit about both holidays and finance I don’t think I’ve ever written something that covers both!

So, with the Christmas holiday season coming up, how were you planning on financing the holiday? Christmas is perhaps the worst holiday to finance as you can have a “worst-case” scenario in terms of finance with the potential for both Christmas presents and a foreign holiday which makes for quite a big bill for some people.

In an ideal world, you’d have saved up for it all months in advance, but then this isn’t an ideal world, is it? Therefore many people are looking to borrow money to finance it all.

Fortunately, many people are in the same boat and therefore there are lots of offers of credit around at this time of year. As a rule, avoid store credit for the presents as this is often the most expensive form of credit and instead look towards the banks. If you’ve not used up all the 0% card offers, this is the time to get filling in the appropriate application forms which can get you up to 9 months interest free credit on purchases and, if you’re lucky enough, you might be able to finance both the Christmas presents and the holiday with one of these cards.

One thing to avoid though is the head in the sand approach that many people take. That attitude will almost certainly cost you dear and you’ll end up paying way over the odds for your borrowing. Even if you can’t get 0%, at least check what interest you’re paying on your credit cards and use the one with the lowest rate to buy whatever needs bought.

One of the handy things about where we live is that we have a choice of four airports within reasonable striking distance which makes for an enormous range of choice when we’re looking for a short break.

In practice, we try to aim for afternoon departures to get a sensible starting time for ourselves but this time Venice seemed too good to miss out on so we had to set off at 7am to get there in time for the 10am flight. Online checkin is wonderful if you want to skip on the sitting around in the airport but unfortunately Wendy’s Australian passport means that we can’t avail of that.

The earlier than normal departure meant that we arrived in Treviso (Ryanair’s “Venice” airport) just after noon and by the time we’d checked into the apartment we were still in reasonable time for a late-ish lunch. Treviso airport is fairly small so there’s not much time wasted walking miles to the exit as you often find in regular airports these days although you lose time on the hour long coach journey to Venice itself (EUR 10 return, children under five free) which takes you through some pretty grim looking towns.

From the bus station you walk across the road to Piazza Roma where you get on one of the quite expensive boats that take you pretty much everywhere in Venice. It’s EUR 6.50 for a one hour ticket (enough to get anywhere) or EUR 14 for a ticket valid for 12 hours. In theory you can get one two or three day tickets as well (actually 24, 36 and 72 hours) but Venice is quite a small place so it’s best working out roughly where you’ll be going as often it’s quicker walking. In our own case, over a four day stay we bought two of the one hour tickets (to get there and away) and one 12 hour one when we were going over to Murano for the day.

Unless you’re seriously into churches, there isn’t really an awful lot to see in Venice. Yes, it’s a lovely place but it’s not one that you’d be wanting to stay more than a week and in practice we found that four days was enough to see all that we wanted to see at a nice gentle pace ie it’s perfect for a short break.

What is there to see though? Well, the major sights are:

• the cathedral square containing San Marco (that’s the interior above);
• the Rialto bridge;
• the island of Murano for the glass;
• the island of Burano for the lace;
• Lido; and
• the canals themselves.

In between all the above you’ll be surrounded by the typical Venetian architecture with loads of cute buildings and, of course, untold numbers of very upmarket shops.