There’s a case for travel planners
Granada’s awe-inspiring Alhambra was sold out across four websites for the next two weeks – we only managed to find entry via a tour that started at 7.30am (sorry about that, Leanne).
She snapped up a ticket to Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, but 10 days out places were limited. My brother, who visited the city only a week earlier, wanted to ‘‘wing it’’ and missed out altogether.
Are Antipodean tourists largely lulled into a sense of she’ll-be-right security because in our own backyards, almost nothing sells out in a matter of hours or days?
In South East Asia, backpackers are encouraged to only book things like hostels and transport once you’re in the country – I managed it only through global aggregators such as booking.com.
Travel is so cheap in Thailand, Cambodia or Vietnam there is not much to gain by booking 12 weeks in advance. Not so in Europe. Home to the world’s most visited countries, things sell out!
But with great amounts of planning, comes great expectations. The spontaneous traveller doesn’t research widely so is largely unaware of what they miss out on but still have a great holiday.
Meanwhile, chronic planners like me have pored over guides, blogs and travel articles to find all the must-dos and must-eats.
With heavily edited reviews and Photoshopped pictures you cannot help but set the bar incredibly high for how your fleeting days in this dream destination will pan out. Even if it does meet the standard, I can often hardly catch my breath before setting off to see the next must-do.
It’s hardly the romanticism normally associated with travelling, but most of us haven’t the annual leave balance to entertain such a fantasy.
A day after my friend left, I received a text from her in Seville: ‘‘Have met this lovely older local couple who want to take me around the nearby sites. It would mean missing Granada/Alhambra and possibly Bilbao. Thoughts?’’
A laissez-faire type would have gone off with them, possibly had the time of their lives, or possibly visited sub-par tourist sites while trying to find the Spanish for ‘‘can I go now, please?’’
My pros and cons list can be paraphrased into: ‘‘You barely know these people, who knows? But I can definitely tell you the Alhambra is stunning and San Sebastian’s food scene is like nothing you’ve seen before – you’d be a fool to miss them’’. And she wasn’t. It wasn’t a conversion to my side, but I’ll take it.