Travel Advice

While cruise ships can no longer visit Cuba and the People to People Educational travel category is being eliminated, we still have clients traveling to Cuba over the next year. Our friend Megumi, who runs the tour operator HabanaLive in Cuba, tells us that clients can either join a People to People trip that has been grandfathered in (they have grandfathered FIT bookings available on multiple dates throughout fall/winter/spring) or travel under a different approved travel category. They have fantastic programing options under the Support for the Cuban People, Professional Research & Meetings, and Religious travel categories. So if you want to visit Cuba, ActiveTravels will get you there! 

Every March or early April, Lisa and I go to an annual 4-day travel conference arranged by our fantastic host agency, Largay Travel, the gateway to all those Virtuoso amenities clients receive including complimentary hotel room upgrades and breakfasts, shipboard credit on cruises, spa treatment freebies, meals, and much more. Largay celebrated 50 years in the industry at the latest bash, so all the finest hoteliers and suppliers came out to introduce themselves in 15-minute meetings throughout the event. In this month’s ActiveTravels newsletter, we present the trips that left us most excited from the event, including seeing the monarch butterfly migration with Natural Habitat Adventures, a South African safari on a budget, and active yoga trips with Backroads. April is also a wonderful time to visit Portugal, especially Porto, with its excellent restaurants and port wine tastings on the banks of the Douro River. Please have a look! 

In the March issue of the ActiveTravels newsletter, we discuss our recent travels to Hong Kong and Bangkok. When we weren’t downing copious amounts of dim sum, we were checking out the art scene, the food markets, and the temples where residents were preparing for the Chinese New Year celebrations. We also experienced 5 of the best hotels in the region. We now only bring carry-on luggage because we change hotels every two days to experience as much as possible of what our clients will encounter during their stays. Also in this issue is a deal on cruising French Polynesia and the family friendly delights of a relatively new Montage resort just outside of Savannah, Georgia.

We’re a membership-based travel agency. Join ActiveTravels and pay the $60 yearly fee and you’ll receive our monthly newsletters, be enrolled for hotel giveaways, and most importantly, have someone to help with planning and be of service if something should go wrong during travels. Once you join, you fill out a travel questionnaire that helps us custom-design your trip based on your likes and dislikes about traveling. We receive our commissions directly from the tour operators, hotels, cruise lines, etc. that we work with around the globe. You don’t pay extra. We simply receive our 10 to 15% cut by sending them business. There are exceptions to this rule. First, airlines only pay commissions on business class seats. So we need to charge you $50 for flight for ticketing. Second, we design a slew of independent itineraries all over America, Europe, and beyond. I just finished designing a 4-month trip to South America for a couple who took a year sabbatical. This includes all logistics-planes, trains, buses, hotels, guides, even a cruise to the Galapagos Islands. This takes a lot of time and often includes small inns or boutique hotels that don’t pay commission. So we have to charge the client directly depending on the number of days. But a typical weeklong independent itinerary fee costs $500-$700. 

As a young travel writer, working as a Contributing Editor at Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel Magazine, I would regularly meet Arthur Frommer in his office in midtown Manhattan. I would come prepared, ready to pitch my 3 to 4 story angles on a sheet of paper and the legendary writer, who made his name penning "Europe on 5 Dollars A Day" in 1957, would politely listen and shoot down every one of my ideas. He then would come up with his own suggestions: "Steve, why don’t you do a story on the Caribbean islands that are rarely affected by hurricanes, like the ABC islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao?" One of those story ideas I would return to again and again in my travel writing career and, in fact, became the cornerstone of our beliefs when we opened our travel agency, ActiveTravels, 7 years ago. Arthur said to me, "Steve, these big-name American travel companies like National Geographic Expeditions are hiring smaller outfitters to run their trips in each of the countries they visit. Find the best small local ground operator in a dozen countries and pen a story on them. This way, you eliminate the middleman and save a bundle." 

In a story I wrote for The Boston Globe on "The Key to Getting a Better Hotel Room," I interviewed Jacob Tomsky, author of the best-selling Heads in Beds (Doubleday). Tomsky, 35, spent a decade in the hotel industry, seven of those years manning the front desk at an upscale midtown Manhattan hotel. I asked him is it better to book a room via a travel agent than to reserve through websites like Hotels.com or Priceline? His response: "From a business standpoint, people who book through third-party travel sites are looking for a discount. The likelihood that they’ll return to your hotel is close to nil. So discount reservations are our last priority. They’re the ones we put next to the elevator." It also doesn’t help that these online travel agents or OTAs are reaping exorbitant finder fees from lodgings, up to 25 percent of cost per room from independent properties, compared to the average 10 percent commission for travel agents.

Last week, we had three clients miss their flight connections and one ActiveTravels member break his clavicle and ribs on a motorcycle accident in Phuket, Thailand. Before our clients even got off their planes, they were rebooked and ready to go on the next available flight. No standing in line for hours at the customer service desk with all the other passengers. The man with the broken bones is still healing in a hospital, but we were able to cancel and reschedule his first-class flight with a slight change fee. In this Do-It-Yourself World, you’re led to believe that you can easily book travel on your own. That’s certainly true, but when a mishap happens, which is inevitable when you travel, it’s good to have someone working on your behalf while you’re still on a plane with no WiFi. 

We arrived around 10 am at the Bangkok Airport with more than enough time to catch our first flight that day to Hong Kong, which would then connect to our Boston flight home. We checked the Cathay Pacific website before we left the hotel and our first flight was on time, as scheduled. But unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. We were told at airport check-in that our first flight had technical problems and would be delayed. There was no way we could make the connecting flight in Hong Kong and the next flight from Hong Kong to Boston would be exactly 24 hours later. Uggh.

These next two weeks, we have clients traveling to all corners of the globe from South Africa to Argentina to Australia. But if you’re looking for something a bit closer, where you can relax on a beach with a good thick book and soak up that sunshine, consider our 5 choices for a quick winter escape in the December ActiveTravels newsletter. Please also read about my recent trip to the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and how, more and more, we’re booking families and groups of friends on private trips with active travel outfitters like Backroads and DuVine.