Manali Rohinesh
Travelling is a fun way to get to know geography, history, civics – subjects that are not all that popular (when in school) with most people – but also one can study art, architecture, dance and music – all the cooler stuff as well. Everyone knows that booking well in advance for a trip results in one getting cheaper fares. But most people discount this fact when they sign up for travel packages with big tour and travel agencies like Kesari, Raj Travels, SOTC, Kuoni, Cox & Kings and Thomas Cook. The reason being that, they are most likely to be too excited thinking about their holiday and all the shopping they are going to be doing there and besides once the trip has been paid for, the airfare bookings are left to these agencies to take care of.
Here is a smart spending tip: Make your own airline bookings, even when you travel with a tour group. Now, I believe, travel operators also prefer it if you did it yourself. A source at Kesari told me that, “We tell customers to make their own airline bookings through the travel portals.” Ironically, the offline agencies and their online rivals may have made this pact as a truce of some kind, so that all people don’t just simply migrate to portals and stop using travel operators. Therefore, travel agencies channel some business their way but obviously, not all of it. They keep hotel bookings to themselves, which is where the meat really is.
For instance, if you want to go to Japan and are travelling alone, then when the operators can’t book a single room for you at your request, then you have to use a room with a double bed, which is considered a twin-sharing one and you’ve got to pay for that spare, unused bed. So, either you take a friend or a family member along or the tour operator might pair you up (at your request and/or with your permission) with a total stranger who is also travelling alone, to cut down this cost for you. Not many people accept this alternative and so they land up paying for two anyway. A Kesari representative Rohan Lotlikar told me that, “In such cases, depending on the country a person travels to, he/she will end up shelling out an extra Rs 13,000 to Rs 20,000 per night for that extra bed.” For this kind of money, I could plan out an entire trip to a different destination!
It is assumed that the travel agencies get huge discounts because they are making such bulk bookings. This discount is in turn passed on to us – customers/travellers. The reality is that they do get a discount but it’s not all that huge because with every travel agency demanding a discount, airlines will obviously not have much margins left to operate with. Besides, with travel websites coming into the picture, the rates are as reasonable as they will ever be.
So why don’t more people notice what I did, when I went to Kashmir in 2008? After I did the math (yes it takes effort but in the end it saves you money), I realized that if I let Kesari do the airline bookings for me – to and fro to Kashmir from Mumbai - it would cost me in the region of around Rs 13,000. They claim not to be keeping any discount to themselves but I don’t know how true this is and who believes travel operators when they make such claims anyway? But when I went online and saw the JetLite fares listed on www.makemytrip.com, they were so much cheaper with the same bells and whistles being offered to an individual - ie. meals (now one has to pay for it onboard) as they would to a travel operator making bulk bookings. What’s more, the fares came to Rs 9,535 only – so much less than what Kesari was charging.
I had signed up for a Kashmir trip for the month of April and told Kesari that I would make my own airline bookings and did so in February. I saved around Rs 3,000. On foreign trips, the amount saved could be much bigger. Kesari didn’t grudge my decision to make my airline bookings independent of them because out of all the other 25 people on the trip with me – only one other couple bothered to do the same thing.
Another way in which online booking works out well is that, the ticket is emailed to you promptly. There is no anxiety and uncertainty if the travel operator’s package of schedule and tickets does not arrive on your doorstep in advance. You spend time stewing about it right up till the last minute. So, ironically, your preparation to go on a vacation itself causes your blood pressure to rise! This is what happened when Kesari did not snail mail any of us the detailed schedule of our trip (which according to a list they provide), they are supposed to send before we leave home, so that we can leave a copy behind with our family in case of an emergency. Our family will know where we are on any given day and where we are staying. So this schedule is vital because it gives the address and phone numbers of all the hotels and the houseboat we were going to check into, for the 10 days we were in Kashmir. Again, only I bothered to call and insist they send it to me a week before we left Mumbai.
I had assumed they had not bothered to send me the schedule because they had not done my airline booking, so they just decided to act spiffy with me. When I got to know the others in Kashmir, it turns out that all of them had come armed with the glossy 30 page catalogue but none of them had the actual schedule. They actually pulled up the two guides who were allotted to us about this and pointed out all the places the catalogue mentioned we would be seeing. We really saw all of them except Sonmarg, which is really one more snowy mountain-valley in a state filled with them, but people thought it was unfair that they were expected to hire a Tata Sumo at their own expense to see this place. But since the actual schedule had been reworked and only I had the new one – Sonmarg was not on the new itinerary - and so I had never got my hopes up to begin with.
All the rest huffed off to Sonmarg because they felt they had paid to see everything mentioned in the old catalogue and so they might as well see some more snow covered mountains at additional expense to themselves! So over and above their airfare charges, that Kashmir trip certainly did not stay within other people’s budgets!