Free Travel Guides For Planning Your Holiday Destination

When it comes to holiday planning you may need some help. Whether you are an avid online researcher or a leave it all to someone else traveller, you could still do with knowing something about your holiday destination before you start the booking process.

If you are travelling point A to point B, and maybe need a hotel, then there are hundreds of online travel agents comparing prices and offering holiday packages. If you like to compare apples for apples then don’t be disappointed when you have to accept a ‘get-what-you-get’ packaged holiday. But if you really want to experience the destination and not follow the same people around the same sights day in and day out, then you need some experience to guide you with your holiday planning.

If you’ve spent any time looking at travel guides and travel review websites you’ll know that it doesn’t take many clicks to end up at a sales page. Usually they are just another link to an online booking platform selling you their own packaged holidays. Well actually they’ll be the same as all the other tours because they are pulling the same information from the same wholesalers’ databases, just adding their own pictures and tweaking the prices.

So what makes a good unbiased and trusted travel guide? Good local information, drilled down to what to do, where to eat, which restaurants to eat at, what sites to see, the sporting events, cafes, nightlife and all the local detail you would need to make your trip great, all contribute to making a destination travel guide good. But there are many that offer that, until they redirect you to book their hotel connections, and their car hire, and their connected tours. A great travel guide needs to be impartial, provide the information as information not as a sales tool.

So you’ve now found the best travel guide and done your research and are up to date on where you want to go, you now enter the maze of booking your trip. That’s no mean feat. You could certainly use one of the myriad of online booking platforms available and possibly get very confused with all of the different options and pricing out there. Like you find with the review sites, they all lead to selling you what they want, not what you want. So what is the most trusted source for travel booking?

Many say the online booking platforms have become dominant in holiday planning and travel booking, but the statistics don’t necessarily back that up. Travellers are turning back to booking with travel agents, with 52% of outbound (overseas) holidays being booked through a travel agent; a real-live behind-the-desk person who sells travel. That number is steadily increasing every year (5% p.a.). Travel Agents are your holiday advocates. They work for you to find the best flights, best hotels, best prices and gel it all together. They are also there for you if something goes wrong while you are away. No they probably won’t go and water your plants, but they can adjust bookings if your flight gets delayed, or cancelled, or make hotel changes if things aren’t working out for you. They are with you before, during, and after your trip; they’re building a relationship with you.

Exactly what goes into planning a holiday? Planning a trip really can be time consuming. In fact, about twenty percent of travellers said it took more than five hours to search and book travel online, and that’s just the air component. Travel agents, however, make a career out of easing your holiday planning pain. They can take away the stress of vetting the countless options out there, give you the best travel advice, and ensure you find the best option, while saving money.

But there are travel agents and then there are travel agents. You can walk into any travel agency and say you want to go to ‘mid-west-far-away’ and the wonderful specialist across the desk will look it up or pull a brochure off the wall. Great, but you could’ve done that yourself. So what would make the difference? Let us answer that for you: Sit on your couch, call the Travel Agent, and ask if anyone has been to ‘mid-west-far-away’ and you get the answer: “Yes, I have.” Wow, someone with real “been-there” experience of the place you are travelling to. You don’t get that very often. No doubt you’d get very excited and book the trip with them.

So a ‘been-there’ travel agent can offer insight that an online booking website won’t be able to, with local knowledge and on the ground experience. Did you know most travel agents travel? That’s one of the attractions to the job. So given their travel industry knowledge and all the on-hand booking tools that they have, and on the ground experience, a travel agent really is your best way to book holiday travel. Remember that if you think you’ve saved $43.78 of airfares and $18 on hotels you’ve lost $200 elsewhere on your trip due to lack of knowledge.

But how do you find these “been-there” travel agents when they are all over the country? The travel expert in your destination could be in another state and you’ll never know. Well there is a travel platform which connects Travellers with “been-there” Travel Agents. Going Expert matches your destination with a powerful database of travel agents who have created profiles of their destinational expertise. They have been where you are going. It costs you nothing to search and match with these holiday planning specialists, and if you see a profile you think is a match, connect with them and you’ll receive all their contact details – still costing nothing.

Oh, and that unbiased #1 best travel guide for planning your holiday destination that was mentioned earlier, well it’s on the Going Expert website. And it’s free too.

If you’re going somewhere, there is a travel agent who has been there too.