Foreign Independent Travel

Foreign Independent Travel is one of the best reasons to use a travel agent. Foreign Independent Travel usually consists of multiple city/country visits, sightseeing suggestions and day-tours that are hooked together with various forms of transportation. Travel Agencies have worldwide access to airfare, hotels, trains, tours, attraction tickets and rental cars plus the knowledge to evaluate vendors and routes so you have a trouble free journey. We subscribe to a Global Distribution System (GDS) which has universal access to even the smallest towns and cities to get access to any flight on earth and hotels in hard to find places. These present "unbiased" displays with the best airfare routing plus guaranteed best rates for guaranteed hotels from all the major chains on earth. We also have tour companies that specialize in Foreign Independent Travel, so we can provide you with prepaid vouchers that make checking in a breeze no matter what language you are working in or what type of communication problems you might have in Timbuktu.

After years of working with itineraries, a good agent can suggest a good pace so you see the sites, but allow enough time for transitions between cities or a stop to soak up local culture. We are creative about adding cruise ships, river cruises, ferries or even overnight trains when it fits the itinerary. Our travel agency specializes in Foreign Independent Travel and we have sent people to almost every corner of the globe for enjoyable experiences on their own.

Planning for an FIT (Foreign Independent Travel) Trip
We suggest that the first thing that you do (after securing a passport book) is make a list of all the cities or sites that you want to see and rank them from most to least important. The priority ranking is important as you might have to cut things to fit into your time or budget. Next figure out the maximum time you have for the trip and set up a maximum budget for the trip. Airfares are more expensive than they used to be so give yourself a few extra days if you have the budget. The prioritized list of destinations, length of time for the vacation and budgetary considerations should be agreed upon by all passengers in the party, before starting the actual process of planning. These should be goals as you may further adjust the process once you start to get to transport considerations or cost of hotels in a foreign currency or weather considerations or the thousands of other considerations that crop up during the planning process.

With the above criteria, you are ready to start working with a travel agent to put together a great trip. With your prioritized list of attractions, cities and countries in hand, don't be surprised to learn that your agent suggests twice as much time as you have alloted to do the list. Based on the prioritized list and the agent's knowledge you can discuss trade-offs of adding a day here and cutting something there or deciding that a three day trek to see this attraction is not worth it. Sometimes your agent might suggest that you knock off this group in this region and leave this group for another trip as they are not near enough to combine in the same trip efficiently (like Northern Europe and the Mediterranean region are better done as two trips) but sometimes you are only going there once (like China or Australia/New Zealand) so you spring for intra-tour airfare to connect far flung cities.

Whether we have been there or not, there is a basic recipe for each destination and "must see" attractions in all parts of the world that are known to agents. Our vendors provide us with info and access to attractions and sightseeing options. We have destination guides, tourist boards and escorted vendors that offer most itineraries on earth so we are not always breaking new ground, but a good agent should be able to break new ground if you want to go somewhere off-beat or visit your families' hometown using a combination of traditional and web tools. If your agent is not familiar with Foreign Independent Travel planning, and keeps suggesting cruises or escorted tours even if you are able to travel indpendently, get another agent. A good agent should be a good listener as this is your dream vacation, not his or hers but should also have the destination knowledge to keep you from making mistakes with itineraries.

Some people need a little help in a strange place
While I am mentioning escorted vacations, these should be considered if you are not well-traveled or want to see a very heavy sightseeing itinerary in an organized fashion. We offer leisurly pace tours and even small group tours (slightly higher) in some instances. Also if you are not able to handle luggage easily on and off trains, ferries, airports or steps. We have escorted vacations that go to most corners of the world if you are not feeling that you can handle the strange language/customs or you have always traveled on an FIT basis but are getting up in years. We also offer "hosted" vacations that are a blend of FIT travel and escorted travel as you do in on your own but have pre-planned airport transfers, sightseeing and a visit by a host to the hotel to welcome you to the destination but provide concierge assistance with the city or country you are visiting.

A LITTLE knowledge is not always a good thing...
You will find multiple tools for itinerary planning, hotel/air booking, and destination guides online so why not "do-it-yourself" with the planning process? Your agent can match most any price you find online but provides an experienced hand to put this all together without much added cost. Our agency even has sources to buy from the online guys when necessary but that deal may not look like a deal when you realize the neigborhood is not safe or you could have spent an extra $40 a day and avoided two hours on public transport daily going to see the sites. We use open jaw airline tickets (into one city and out of another) on most Foreign Independent Travel. We know which airlines go with other airlines in the same alliances to get the best routing and fare. We can sometimes suggest little known transporation methods like overnight trains or overnight ferries that can shorten the journey. We have had clients have to back-track when they bought tickets before coming in to do planning or we have even seen flight itineraries that came into JFK and out of Laguardia or into Gatwick and out of Heathrow without clients noticing the mistake. Finally a good travel agent is always available when something goes wrong with weather, strikes, bankruptcy of a supplier, natural event, terrorism or any of the thousands of things that can disrupt the transport system and keep you from getting from point A to point B. Face it, do-it-yourself may be fine for pumping gas but when you are taking the vacation of a lifetime you want a good plan for a fun time and efficient movement through the world.

Formalize the Plan
Your agent should give you a basic itinerary that is agreed to by all parties, before finalizing the plan. Usually, we do the air first as that is kind of the bookends that signal the start and end of the trip. We actually see flights 330 days prior to departure so we suggest doing the air as early as possible for the best flight choices, routing and times. Buying the airline ticket is always a crap-shoot in terms of pricing as airfares go up and down, but you can't start nailing down hotels until you have dates and most booking options have change charges so you need the air to finalize the itinerary. We are able to do airfares at the last minute and hold space for 24 hours usually to get all hotels confirmed too. It is very hard to get it all in Zen on the web before you pull the trigger, but we are able to do that with many tour companies and airline fares. In popular cities during peak season the best hotels are usually at a premium so early planning will assure you can stay in the prime areas. Once the plan is finalized, your agent can give you an idea about final costs and any terms that are available. Most airfare is instant purchase, but some vendors allow us to do a small deposit and a final payment 45 or 60 days prior to departure. Some hotels are even guaranteed in our GDS and paid by credit card at check in. Most "matched" online rates are instant purchase and many of them are fully nonrefundable as are airfares so we always suggest you take a good travel insurance policy in case your plans change because of sickness, weather or disruption. We even sell policies that take into account the fact that you are a care-giver or might cancel for business reasons so discuss travel insurance options with your agent. This is especially true for Foreign Independent Travel as one component may cause you to miss another component and trigger cascading penalties when something goes wrong. These policies will also provide supplemental medical insurance, pay for delay expenses and even provide emergency evacuation procedures if something goes really wrong with your health or the destination.

Proximity versus Cost, Star Ratings and Value for Money
There is always a trade-off between proximity and cost. We usually suggest that you stay as close to the city centre as you can afford. Sometimes it is even worth sacrificing a star with the hotel rating to be able to come and go from your base at all hours to see the sights. For example, I like to go have a gelato on the Spanish steps in Rome at night but you can't do that if you are saving money at a hotel that requires a half hour bus ride from the "ring road" into the city. Most foreign hotels carry a slightly lower rating than US rating services provide and everybody rates hotels subjectively so buy half a star more than you want to get. One and two star hotels are very basic everywhere in the world. Three star hotels are a step above basic, but you usually need 31/2 or 4 stars to get an acceptable world standard if you are used to good hotels. Many hotel websites and intermediaries exagerate star ratings but travel agency vendors and our GDS use world standards for a more honest rating. Our Foreign Independent Tour Companies have a representative actually go look at the hotel and rooms at least bi-yearly when the do contracts and those inspections are more reliable than Trip Advisor or Cruise Critic as the ratings are done by a trained eye. We do look at consumer ratings online and in fact many of our vendors incorporate those into our booking engines but we also take them with a grain of salt because of the wide variety of personalities that write them including fake good ratings by hotel staff/management and fake bad ratings by competitor hotels. Your travel agent will assist you to buy the best value you can afford so you have a pleasant experience no matter what your budget is.

This all sounds wonderful so how much does it cost to use an agent?
That is the best part as travel agencies get paid commission by hotels, cruises, tour vendors and others to handle bookings; so our fees are very low or not charged at all in some instances. We charge absolutely no fee on tour company bookings, cruises, river cruises or major hotel chain bookings that are components of an FIT Itinerary. We do charge between $25 and $50 per person on airline tickets as the carriers don't pay commission anymore and cause more problems that need to be fixed with itinerary changes, seat cancellations when aircraft change, problems with weather or natural disasters that are all covered by our airline management fees. We monitor your flights daily with a que system that immediately drops a message if there is a problem even if you are traveling without email, we have your back.

We also charge an hourly itinerary planning fee of $50 per hour that covers train tickets, ferries, noncommissionable b and bs, or tiny hotels that don't subscribe to the GDS or are not part of a chain. This fee/time covers us providing you with a custom itinerary that covers all the aspects of your trip including train car # and seat, restaurant/city tips, reservations for attractions and all the little stuff you need to connect the dots with your vacation. Our vendors frequently provide destination guides along with vouchers so the fee also covers toner and paper for printing destination guides, etc. We provide you with comprehensive documentation that includes vouchers for each service rendered, e-tickets, train tickets, car rental vouchers, hotel vouchers or confirmations. Except for the most complicated itinerary this is usually only an hour or two as we only bill for actual time worked on the final itinerary or noncommissionable components. Finally, we charge a 10% premium on any self-catering or apartment style accommodations that we do directly with owners and we are pretty good at evaluating units or owners as we worked with small hotels for twenty years as Caribbean tour operators and a sloppy house usually has a sloppy administration that we can evaluate before signing you up. As you can see from the sample itineraries above, we are very good at what we do and provide a tight complete accounting and day by day itinerary. Stop by, call or email your request for a proposal and we can develop a custom itinerary for you.