Want to Cut Your Travel Costs? Consider the Hand-Holding Principle.
One way to reduce your costs is to travel in the off-season. This is the other way.
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Travel writers will often tell you that one of the easiest ways to reduce your travel costs is to avoid popular destinations during the busiest times of the year.
But there’s another way to greatly reduce your costs — a method that even many travel writers don’t know.
I call it the Hand-Holding Principle of Travel.
It goes like this: the more you rely on someone to make your travel simple and easy — the more someone “holds your hand” — the more you’re going to pay.
Before I continue, let me make one thing crystal clear: there is absolutely nothing wrong with paying someone to help make your travel experience simple and easy!
Travel should be enjoyable. The definition of “vacation” is literally “a period of time devoted to pleasure, rest, and relaxation.”
If you only have limited time to travel, paying someone to help you do it can be an extremely logical choice.
By calling my observations the Hand-Holding Principle of Travel, I also don’t mean to disparage or infantilize folks who choose easier methods of travel.
But hey, I gotta call it something.
And if you’re choosing to travel with someone holding your hand, you should know exactly what you’re paying for — so you can decide when and if it’s worth it.
After eight years of continuous travel, Michael and I are now very experienced travelers. And we’ve come to see that the premium people pay to have someone hold their hand is far higher than most people think.
There are other benefits to traveling without hand-holding too — namely, that you’ll almost certainly have a much more authentic and “local” experience.
But, of course, there are also risks and other costs. If nothing else, you’ll have to spend some serious time researching alternative travel options.
What does all this mean, practically speaking?
What exactly does travel “hand-holding” look like?
How do you travel without someone holding your hand? And how much can you save?
What are the other benefits? And what are the risks?
What are some examples of travel hand-holding?
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