If you’re planning to head off for a vacation this year, especially to a foreign land, here’s some travel advice from several experienced sources, including The Points Guy and the PBS travel guy.
“How to Win at Travel” was written by Brian Kelly, known online as The Points Guy. This is a pretty comprehensive volume of practical advice for both the seasoned traveler and the novice. “The goal of this book,” he writes, “is to give you the knowledge to perform better at the sport of travel, a game of acquiring knowledge in understanding how the system operates … to teach you how to get the most value from the travel ecosystem.”
For those people often on the move, there are chapters filled with information on how to leverage frequent flyer miles, credit card points, and loyalty programs. “Points are real, nonliquid assets,” he writes. “Points and miles are a currency that you can collect.” The detail he goes into is incredible. Math is involved. He gives specifics on which credit cards earn more points where, how to buy points, which loyalty programs may work for you, and then how to maximize and redeem the rewards on airfare, hotels, rental cars and more.
There’s good stuff here for even rookie travelers: budgeting, booking options, exchange rates, using foreign ATMs, group or family trips vs. traveling alone, travel etiquette, whether to get travel insurance, tips to avoid being a victim of crime, lost luggage, how to avoid jet lag, and much more.
Kelly suggests that “Taking a trip can be an investment in your mental and physical health,” but “Everyone needs to create a personal travel strategy that works for them.”
Two small books with similar titles could also be helpful for different reasons. “How to Win at Travel and Life” by Lisa Jenean (63 pages) is more of an early-in-the-trip-planning-stage overview. It “will help you set clear travel goals and, most importantly, achieve them,” writes the author. The book consists mostly of lists and ideas of places to go around the world, along with what each place offers, including US. National Parks and the most popular world resorts, cruises, and amusement parks. She talks about setting travel goals and budgeting for travel.
“How to Win at Traveling” by Simona Maria Loraine (49 pages) is, in the author’s words, “A Practical Guide to Achieving Success on Every Journey.” She asks the reader to “Consider it your travel toolkit, full of tips that will make your trips unforgettable for all the right reasons.” Her general advice includes budgeting, mastering the art of packing light, navigating transportation abroad (rail passes, subways, etc.), cultural etiquette (mostly telling you to look it up online), and safety and security. She includes a good list of further resources at the end. Have a flexible itinerary, she suggests; that will let you take advantage of unexpected opportunities.
I’ve enjoyed the travel shows of Rick Steves on PBS for many years. In his latest book, “On the Hippie Trail,” he takes us on an adventure we can only experience vicariously, as it’s no longer available.
In 1978, Steves was a 23-year-old piano teacher with a college degree in history. That summer he and a friend decided to take the “Hippie Trail” — 3,000 miles from Istanbul, Turkey, to Kathmandu, Nepal. “By the 1960s, this route was attracting a new breed of traveler … young backpackers. Hippies.”
As a history major, he was strongly affected by his surroundings: “I was following in the footsteps of Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and countless Silk Road traders.” He tells us about transportation: airplanes, trains, buses, rental bikes, cars, rickshaws, the back of a truck; some of his activities: hiking, hitchhiking, waterskiing, canoeing; and the places they stayed: hotels, the YMCA, a houseboat. He writes, “Many hotels on the Hippie Trail came with dirt floors and no glass in the windows. When I complained about a dirty sheet, the hotelier apologized and turned it over.”
During monsoon season in India, he writes, “Around us was dripping jungle. It looked as it if had been raining nonstop for a hundred years.” In Nepal, “we wandered through a timeless village floating in a wonder-world. The full moon lit the endlessly layered valley and between each row of hills, a white pillow of clouds cuddled.” He was moved by some of the poverty he saw: “I was really shocked at how good life can be for some and how relatively miserable it can be for others,” and he writes, “You can’t put a price tag on the value of being an American.” He says he came home “with the most valuable souvenir: a broader perspective.” He suggests that “The flip side of fear is understanding, and we gain understanding through travel.”
The two guys were just in time: “1978 was the final summer of the Hippie Trail. With the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Islamic revolution in Iran, safe and easy travel through both countries came to an abrupt end in 1979.”
Steves also wrote “Travel as a Political Act” several years ago, but he’s updated it several times. In the title, he isn’t referring to partisan politics. He means that “when we return home, we can put what we’ve learned — our newly acquired broader perspective — to work as citizens of a great nation confronted with unprecedented challenges. And when we do that, we make travel a political act.” This book is really a long essay full of his observations, experiences, and opinions, with lots of sidebars with specific examples. He advises travelers to look around as they travel, to see places as part of history or art or culture, to make travel more meaningful.
He has learned to value diversity — “I’ve spent a third of my life overseas, living out of a backpack, talking to people who see things differently than me.” — and to enjoy cultural differences in people — “One of the greatest rewards of travel comes from the people you encounter — especially if you’re open to letting them show off a bit and impress you with their culture.” He writes, “I believe travel should bring us together.”
Have a good trip. And happy reading!
Mary Louise Ruehr is a books columnist for The Portager. Her One for the Books column previously appeared in the Record-Courier, where she was an editor.