The 3 Year Vacation Mistake
My hand hovered over the keyboard. I knew I shouldn’t do it. I knew if I did this one thing, it would come with immense consequences I would feel for years.
When I was 22 years old, I opened up a credit card and booked myself a vacation.
I had zero business booking myself a vacation I couldn’t afford. Sure I had a professional teaching job, but I wasn’t rolling over in dough. I had expenses. Grad school payments, my portion of the bills split with roommates and of course monthly rent. To say there were scraps leftover to cover the balance is laughable. The vacation that took me 3 minutes to book also took me 3 years to pay off.
Back then, I didn’t know about travel agents or ways to save money on vacations. I honestly didn’t even know there were realistic options for a twenty-something other than Walt Disney World. I convinced myself I was being independent, but I was actually being quite lazy. Being independent when booking and planning vacations isn’t something to be proud of, it actually wastes a lot of time and money. Knowing what I know now, I wish I could have gone back in time, waved that white flag and asked for planning help.
Young professionals should shake the “I can do it myself” mindset, because we can’t do it ourselves. And honestly? We don’t do it ourselves. We go to hairdressers to get our hair cut. We go to restaurants to have nice meals. We get our oil changed. We pay professionals each day for services so why aren’t we using travel professionals, the experts in the field, to book and plan our travel?
Here is the kicker with all of those examples. Only a travel agent is free to use. Each vendor builds into the cost the use of a travel professional. Every all-inclusive, hotel, cruise, theme park even museums and tours, include this service into the price. The numbers you see online are the same you would see if you contacted a travel agent. Use one of not, you’re paying for a concierge service you may not receive if you decided to do the booking and planning solo.
Using a travel agent allows you to think beyond Disney to examine the possibilities of what you can actually do with the budget you have. We live in an amazingly big world and their job is to listen to your wants and needs and curate incredible options to present to you for your consideration.
A travel agent’s job is to take great care of your plans, which include monitoring your vacation day-after-day to find and apply promos, look for price dips and upgrades. There was absolutely no way as a beginning teacher I had time to do any of that and I would imagine most people don’t have the luxury of that type of time.
Young professionals need to stop lighting their hard earned money on fire and ask for help instead of letting ego take the lead. Booking a vacation without help isn’t impressive. What’s impressive is finding a professional in the field to do the work for you, for free. If I had done that, maybe I would have gone on a better, more cost-effective vacation. I would have been sipping Pina Coladas on a sandy beach instead of panicking on Space Mountain that I overdrafted my bank account.
Emily Carlson is the Owner of We Do Travel Right, an award winning travel agency in Western, Massachusetts. Life is short, take the trip.
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