Greetings from Thailand!
Well 2023 is here, the holidays and my philosophizing are over, and it's time to get back to travel 🙂 I hope you squeezed in a little down time and got your fill of holiday cheer - mine felt brief but wonderful, and I am recharged for all the trips to come.
We have two trips beginning imminently, with a group making our first foray to the magical rainforests of Costa Rica, and another coming all the way out here to Thailand for our Koh Samui LiveAway. So we've got travellers travelling, and a whole bunch of future trips to release in the weeks ahead.
We'll be releasing mostly 2024 trips from here, though we have a few more 2023 adventures to come that we couldn't squeeze in before Christmas. We had a busier than anticipated December that continued right through the break.
Both our Galapagos and Ireland trips, though they were released just before we closed our inboxes, are already half full, part of a wider trend I think of what will be a busy year ahead.
It was a few months into 2022 before travel came back, and many travellers in this community and elsewhere finally got to go on trips that were supposed to happen in the pandemic years. I received emails all year from people who were booked up for 2022 (and even 2023) asking about our plans for 2023 and 2024, once the postponed ones were in the books.
All that means that 2023 is really the first full year back and when people are more free to make new travel plans. For the travel industry this means another year of high demand and some of the issues regarding hotel space etc that were a problem in 2022 are likely to still persist.
What this means for you is that it's probably a good idea to get your travel plans booked earlier rather than later. We've had quite a number of last minute requests to join us on programs in the first and second quarter of this year that we were unable to fulfill, due to hotels being maxed out already.
I appreciate that some of us are planners and know where we're going a year out, some of us like to live free and uncaged and prefer to book at the last minute, and some of us are in the middle somewhere. Unfortunately the state of things at the moment does not favour the free birds, unless you're completely agnostic about the destination.
We can in some cases arrange a second trip if the first sells out, as we are doing with Morocco (coming very soon), but our ability to do so is highly dependant on the destination. Big picture there is no shortage of fun and interesting places to go, it's just that first choices may disappear quite quickly.
Lots more to come, most of all in the days ahead as I head to Bangkok to greet our members joining us for our Samui pre-program there. Do get in touch if you have questions about upcoming trips, and stay tuned for a whole bunch of programs for 2024 coming shortly.
Cheers!
Leave a comment!