Happy New Year! Hope your 2015 is off to a happy, healthy, start, including your travel plans. We really enjoyed our 2014 travels, and were lucky enough to visit several of the resorts mentioned in Best Luxury Hotels of 2014: Top 10 Most Popular TravelSort Hotels, but there's always room for improvement in how we travel and plan our travel. Here are our New Year's travel resolutions so far:
1. Get More Sleep
Ok, this one isn't just travel-specific: in general, my husband and I both have a goal of getting more sleep. But it becomes especially important while traveling, with the potential jet lag and juggling my client work with inspecting new hotels and resorts with family vacation time. Everything is just better when everyone in the family is well rested.
2. Stay at Some More Luxury Boutique Hotels
We and many of our clients are great fans of established luxury brands such as Four Seasons, The Peninsula, Mandarin Oriental, and in particular, Aman Resorts (which are very boutique like, since typically there are fewer than 40 stand alone villas and very personalized service).
But certain popular destinations are full of great luxury boutique hotels, castles, historical homes and other unique lodging–Italy's Amalfi Coast and Tuscany regions, Wales in the UK and New Zealand just being a few examples–so we hope to try some of these unique properties this year.
3. Get a Smaller Travel Carry-on for My Husband
As regular readers know, we never check baggage, so it's important that we can fit everything in our carry-ons. My husband's rolling suitcase works fine for major long haul nternational flights, especially as we only fly business or first class internationally, but it doesn't technically meet the size restrictions of low cost regional carriers, which we sometimes take. Plus, I'm convinced that it's larger size leads us to pack more than we really need.
Now, we're not going to buy a fancy Tumi or other designer carry-on (we'd rather spend that on a really memorable travel experience, such as our Selamatan Dinner with Gamelan music and Javanese dance at Amanjiwo's Dalem Jiwo Suite) but if readers have any suggestions for Samsonite or similar compact wheeled carry-ons at ~$100 or less, we're all ears.
4. Read More About Our Destination Before We Go
After our recent trip to the temples of Angkor, my husband was curious to learn more about the Khmer civilization and borrowed a great book on it from the library. Not only did the Khmer civilization create some of the largest urban centers of its day, it memorialized some sage advice such as “Never argue with your wife” 🙂
But back on topic, it made me wish that we'd carved out time to read more about Cambodia and the society that produced the temples, before our journey. I also plan to be on the lookout for interesting films and children's books about the places we'll be visiting, as a way of piquing my son's interest as well and tuning us into more of the history and culture of where we'll be going.
5. Husband: Plan More of Our Travel
Do you find that you're the default travel planner in your family? I know I am, even though I aim to delegate certain parts of the trip, such as a car rental. On the one hand, it's usually easier for me to do everything, but on the other, there's a lot of time involved, and it would be wonderful to share the work involved with my husband. Plus, I feel that being more involved in planning has its own rewards, creating more anticipation as you look forward to everything that you've planned. We haven't figured out the right balance yet, but we plan to work on it.
6. My Son: Have More Influence Over Where We Travel
While a fair amount of our travel is driven by where my clients are actually traveling to or considering traveling to, some of it of course is also our own family vacation. And now that my son is 7 (and even since he was 6) he's having more of a say over where we spend our vacation time. Last year, he chose where we'll be going in Spring this year, and for reasons we didn't expect.
7. See More of NYC
It's easy to ignore what's in your own backyard, what with day to day work, school and routines. But many of us live in places that others come to visit, even if we only get out to explore our own town or city when we have visiting relatives or friends. One of our resolutions, then, is to take more advantage of NYC, whether it's catching an exhibition, trying out a new restaurant, or going to a comedy show (so glad that we managed to catch a taping of The Colbert Report a couple years ago, before that went off the air).
Back in college, I remember an Austrian friend telling me how he and a buddy decided to, just for fun, pretend they were tourists in Vienna one day. They both happen to speak unaccented English, so they went around to popular sights, had their photos taken by locals, went to cafes, etc. They claimed they were treated even better than when they spoke German 😉 While I'm not convinced that holds true in NYC, I loved their initiative of seeing their hometown through new eyes.
What are your 2015 travel resolutions?
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