A Guide To Independent Travelling

For many people, a yearly fortnight to Tenerife is all they want from life: they often use the same travel agents and even book the same hotel if they’ve enjoyed their stay once and will go back year after year after year, doing the same things, seeing the same people, sitting in the same bars and on the same beaches. 

And I suppose if you’ve been on one beach-package holiday, you’ve been on them all.  If all you want is somewhere to sleep, a nice beach to sit on and somewhere nice to eat dinner every night, then what’s the point in going further afield or to somewhere different if you know that the hotel you went to last year had all those things?

But if you’re not content with sitting on a beach for a fortnight with a paperback; if you want to experience some local culture; taste some actual local food; see things that are a bit off the beaten track, then it’s quite hard to get all that through a standard package deal.   True, most package holidays allow you to book excursions when you arrive, but that involves going at set times, with people you may or may not get along with, who may or may not want to do the same things as you do.  It also means that you will pay over the odds, because the travel reps will be adding on their commission for buying you the tickets, so any discount there might have been for a large group booking is somewhat negated.

But it’s a bit of a brave step to travel independently, surely?

To travel independently, all you need to do is decide where you’re going, book the flights and the first night’s accommodation.  Take a guide book with you that includes full details and reviews of accommodation and attractions (they will have phone numbers of all those so you can make enquiries when you’re there) and make sure you have change for the pay phone.  You’ll also need to make sure that your first night’s accommodation isn’t too far from your point of arrival – so book one either near the airport, or near a train station (you’ll be able to take a train from almost any airport), so that it’ll just be a short taxi ride to your bed. 

Choose a city to fly into and a city to fly out of, and travel at will in between.  If you’re on the continent, most countries’ public transport puts ours to shame and is cheap, reliable and clean, so take advantage of it rather than hiring a car.  If you like a hotel or a particular city, stay a little longer; if not, you can move on. 

It’s wonderfully liberating to have the holiday that you want; it takes a little more preparation, perhaps, and doesn’t come with transfers to and from your hotels, but once you’ve done it once you’ll wonder why anyone ever bothers with package deals.