BEFORE you start planning for your holiday next year, Trafalgar Global CEO Gavin Tollman offers some thoughts and tips to ensure that it will be a trip to remember.
MAKE YOUR TRAVELS MATTER
It is about taking care to ensure that how you travel will directly benefit the places you visit. Sustainability means protecting the communities, wildlife or environment and ensuring they will continue to exist for future generations to come.
Choose tour companies who operate holistically and are making a tangible, measurable impact across the three pillars of sustainability – economic, socio-cultural and environmental.
Some 60% of Trafalgar’s itineraries now contain at least one visit to a Unesco World Heritage site, where special care is taken to help preserve these places for generations to come.
LET YOUR TASTE BUDS BE YOUR GUIDE
Beyond its culinary merits, travellers are looking at food as a way to connect to the cultures they visit and the stories behind the meals.
It’s a way to understand a regison’s unique cultural nuances through the universal language of food.
Take Trafalgar’s Be My Guest dining experiences for example. Travellers on its guided holidays not only enjoy a home-cooked meal in the homes of their hosts – a private vineyard, or historical chateaux or a century-old farm – it’s also a great way to see the destination you visit through a local’s lens.
ACTIVE ADVENTURES AWAIT
People are lacing up their hiking boots and taking themselves, literally, off the beaten path to get out and explore the world.
The motivation isn’t pushing your physical limits but pushing the boundaries of a typical holiday to explore the cultural and natural wonders that lie further afield, on foot.
From trekking up the Inca Trail through Machu Picchu’s agricultural terraces high up to the mountains, to hiking across indigenous lands, adventure beckons.
For 2020, why not join Trafalgar’s new trips to explore the red rock plains of the American Southwest or discover the untamed wilderness of Tasmania.
Learn about their ancient cultures from Trafalgar’s indigenous local guides through their tales of these remarkable civilisations.
FAMILY-BONDING THROUGH TRAVEL
More travellers are seeking holidays that offer activities that the entire family can do together, from the children to the grandparents.
But these trips go beyond family-bonding as they serve as valuable educational moments for the children, opening their eyes to new cultures, languages and food.
They take history out of the textbooks and makes it real. But most importantly, it’s fun – for everyone.
It’s about finding hands-on activities like cooking classes, or experiences that allow everyone to discover the wonders in the world.
MAKE TRAVEL ABOUT CONNECTIONS
Too often, when planning a holiday, we have a tendency to focus on what we should see, what items we need to tick off our bucket lists.
But when we shift our focus from seeing to experiencing, that’s when the true magic of a destination is revealed.
The first step is to get away from the crowds – dip into the small alleyways, get outside the city limits, explore the local sights that aren’t listed in your guidebook. It’s in these hidden gems that we find the essence of a destination.
Therefore, it’s important to choose travel options that have itineraries built around taking you into the local communities to meet the people that call them home, to learn their culture and traditions through their stories, in their own words.
ATTRACTIVE DEALS
Instead of trying to get things right yourself, why not let the travel experts with all the right connections handle everything.
Trafalgar is offering the best savings now for 2020 holidays at 2019 prices, and with airlines also offering attractive deals for next year’s flights.
For more information, visit http://trafalgar.holidaytours.com.my/ or talk to Holiday Tours, Trafalgar’s official retailer in Malaysia at 03-6286 6220.
