Travel Advice

I am comfortable enough with overseas travel now that I can honestly say, I don’t think I’ll ever book another trip through a travel company again. Not that I actually booked with a travel company this time around. I just bought a Groupon and unfortunately those packages are sold by random travel agencies. They didn’t sell me a tour group, mind you. Tour groups are annoying. All this agency did was book my hotels and flights basically, and then said screw you figure out the rest on your own. Which is fine, but the trip I purchased in Greece was an 8-day excursion to three different locations, two of them islands.

The problem is, the visitation of three locations in Greece is not practical for an 8-day visit. Especially when two locations are islands that require hours long ferry rides…ferry rides that cancel when the wind blows hard. At this point, who knows if I’ll even get back to Athens in the morning like I’m supposed to. So there were numerous problems with the ferry transfers and I spent almost a full day’s worth of travel in the economy section of a ferry boat. Which is actually better than the economy section of a plane, but still not fun.

So, why did this agency sell a tour of Greece to three separate locations given the annoyance that most travelers would have with so much travel in a week’s time? You got me there. I thought these ferry transfers were twenty minute rides, like the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. Lord, I never dreamed they would have put me on ferries that were five hours a rip. And then one ferry didn’t go because it was windy. What in the world? Stop it. Don’t sell a tour of several Greek islands for customers who only have a week. What are you doing? Go to Athens for a week. Go to Mykonos for a week. Go to Santorini for a week. But for God sake’s don’t go to all three in a week.

Listen people, travel is easy now. You can find a place you want to go…research your hotels and book them online. Book your air flight. You have GPS to get you anywhere on foot or by car. You have the Uber app that works most places in the world to get from point A to point B, you have apps that translate, and foreign people all around the world who speak English better than many Americans. You can do this easier than you can probably bake a cake. So, don’t use a travel agency. If you do use Gate1. But, I recommend you do it yourself. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and headache. Because at the end of the day, these travel companies are just agents sitting behind a desk while you are out in the world dealing with all the problems they cause with their nonsense. Most of their workers probably never been further than the local Walmart.

You can always email to and I’ll take you on my next trip….well, okay, maybe not. But, you get the point.