2009-06-09 On the Road Again; Travel Planning
Seminars@Hadley
On the Road Again: Travel Planning, Techniques and Tips
Presented by
Ginger Irwin
Sue Melrose
Dawn Turco
Moderated by
Karen Woodfork
June 8, 2009
Karen Woodfork
My name is Karen Woodfork and I am the director of the student services department. I’d like to take this time to welcome you all to our seminar today. Your presenters today are going to be Hadley instructors Ginger Irwin and Sue Melrose, along with our senior vice president, Dawn Turco.
Ginger is also a certified orientation and mobility instructor and Sue is a parent and experienced blind traveler. Our senior vice president, Dawn Turco, is also a low-vision traveler. I think we’re going to be beginning with Sue Melrose, so there you go, Sue.
Sue Melrose
Hi, everyone. I have been with Hadley since 1985. I started out as a computer consultant and then I worked in the computer department for a while and then moved over as an instructor in the family program. Now I teach Braille and early independence courses to families and professionals.
I am an experienced traveler. I have traveled to Europe on my own when I was in my 20’s and I’ve traveled around the country extensively. Through a lot of missteps and whatever, I think I’ve picked up a few clues that I hope will be helpful to you today.
So, I will turn this over to Ginger.
Ginger Irwin
Good morning. I have been a certified orientation mobility specialist for the last 14 years and also a part time instructor with Hadley those same 14 years. I’ve had opportunities to work with individuals from age two to age 92.
I’ve also had opportunity to learn from many of my friends who have traveled and used many of these tips on their own, so I will pass it over to Dawn.
Dawn Turco
Good morning, all. This is Dawn Turco. I’m Hadley’s Senior Vice President for Educational Operations. I’ve been here with Hadley for 15 years and am in my 16th and loving it.
Today I’m here because I have a serious case of the travel bug. I really can’t put my finger on when that started, but I do recall leaving the United States for the very first time back in high school on a trip to Nova Scotia, Canada, and remember my first overseas trip being for student teaching in England when I was in college.
It’s gotten to where I am not happy unless I am planning my next trip. If I don’t already have one in the hopper when I get back from the most recent trip, boy am I back researching, starting up for the next one.
Today I’m getting us started with some research in travel planning ideas. Let me say first, if you’re not comfortable with doing research online or through the Internet, go to a travel agent. Even if you are interested in doing research on your own, and I do recommend it, you still may want to go to a travel agent. It’s all about your own comfort level. For me, as I said, it’s almost a hobby doing the research for upcoming trips and I have become more and more comfortable with using the Internet for booking purposes.
If you were on a little bit early, you heard some of the chatter amongst the participants today of those who have taken Hadley’s Internet courses. We do have two, so I’ll do a quick pitch. If you’re not comfortable with the Internet, consider Internet Basics or Internet Beyond the Basics. It’s in Beyond the Basics that we touch on the topic of travel planning.
When you’re thinking about where you might want to go, there are a variety of ways that you might start gathering your information. That includes going to the tourism sites. Most cities and states and countries have those sites. I’ve even gone to the local chamber of commerce site to get an idea of what there is to do when I think I might want to visit an area.
A great way to find out what the key sites are is to look at the tourist sites—thescheduled tour operators. Where do they take people? Most often, those half-day and full-day tours are touching on the highlights in any location, so I look to see where the tours are going and I may choose a tour but I may not. I may just start researching those sites on my own and find out which ones have entrance fees and which ones are free.
I happen to love hop-on, hop-off tours and just am back from San Francisco where they have such a thing. I took advantage of it in Dublin. With hop-on, hop-off, you get a bus. It takes you to where you want to go, it lets you off and you can tour at your leisure any particular site, and then go back and just wait for the next bus to come along. They run frequently, so hop-on, hop-offs are among my favorite.
When you’re doing your research, you want to look at the weather conditions year-round. Often, I like to travel during the low season when things are a little bit cheaper. I also want to know what that means in terms of weather. If I’m heading to a tropical location and can’t get to the pool or the beach, I’m not going to be happy, so it might be worth a few more dollars to get myself to the beach.
Look for deal buttons all the time, but we have lives, too. We can’t be constantly researching, so a good thing to do is to consider signing yourself up for newsletters from your favorite operators. I’ll be revealing my age a little bit, but I’ll mention that AARP has a newsletter that comes out that I have found helpful. Traveloni Cares, most of the hotels have a newsletter announcement of special deals and, of course, the airlines all have their special deals and e-fares that you can monitor via their own announcements.
I would recommend having a separate e-mail address because otherwise you could have lots and lots of these things popping in on either your business e-mail or where you have your personal friends e-mailing you. We’re lucky at home, we happen to be using AOL and there’s a separate site that my husband and I use for sending all travel information, all travel bookings.
I happen to be a fan of a thing called kayak.com. It’s a place that I go to just start researching what the going fares are for airlines, hotels, cruises, and rental cars. My husband travels with me, or when I travel with the girls, they’re able to drive, so from time to time we rent a car.
One of our instructors here at Hadley told me that she likes travelocity.com. She feels it’s very friendly to JAWS users. Others, you’ve heard them, I’m sure, on radio and TV ads. Hotel.com, orbitz.com, cheaptickets.com, there’s many of them. Once you start your research you’re going to be seeing more and more of them popping up.
I happen to get used to one and tend to stick with it for a while. For example, with airfares, I’m in the Chicago area. It’s a hub for United so I tend to fly United when the prices allow me to do so. I have become very comfortable with their site as a low vision person. It’s not necessarily as clean a site as some others for Access Technology users.
I hear that American Airlines is a little better, but if you’re not in a city that utilizes those carriers, you’re going to tend to want to go with what gives the best fares and flight plans for your city. I’m told that Northwestern has a text-only site and that Southwest’s site is pretty easy to follow as well.
My tip would be to always compare. Always check the actual airline versus the alternative site, meaning if I find fares on Kayak, I still go to the regular airline site just to double check that fare and make sure they’re not offering something better. I often book through the actual hotel or airline site to eliminate any of the added on fee, although many websites nowadays are starting to cut back on the fees to get us all out there traveling again.
You have to consider how luxurious you want your travel to be. Certainly, you can sort by hotel stars, by hotel prices, and you can sort by distance from downtown or airports. There are all kinds of ways that you can sort through the information. Even if you go on to a travel agent, you’ve got in your mind what it is you’re interested in and can communicate that more effectively.
When budgeting, always consider the extra add-ons. Those can add up—theprice of getting to and from airports on either side, tours, dining. If you’re on a cruise, I always say please budget for shore excursions. You don’t want to just get off the boat and have nothing but shops. There are always fun things to do in the various ports so you want to budget for those.
If you have the ability to take a virtual tour and see some of the sites, hotels, and cruise ships, I do it all the time. I love taking the virtual tours to get a better idea of what I’m about to book.
Go to reviews. One of the sites I like to use is tripadvisor.com. For those of you listening in don’t worry about writing all these down. We’re going to have a resource list for you and you’ll be able to download that in a day or two. I like to hear what the actual people on the trips and who have stayed at the hotels have to say. Quite often it has influenced my opinion and I might switch hotels based on something somebody said.
I find sometimes not booking an actual vacation package has worked for me. Sometimes it does, so again, because this is kind of a hobby, I tend to price things out and decide after I’ve done that. If I’m not absolutely sure about my plans, often hotels allow cancellation up to the day of arrival. I find that helpful for me.
Before I book online, I triple check everything, and then I think I might go back and triple check again because I’ve made mistakes. You want to be extraordinarily careful about the dates. You want to be sure you have the correct airports. It’s very easy in an area with multiple airports to accidentally book the wrong airport. You want to check the AM versus the PM flights. You want to check the number of stops and how long the layover is in between each one. Be sure that you’ve got everything the way you want it before you push the book button. And then, too, be sure you look at their cancellation policies.
You want to take a copy of your itinerary with you. Copy things off. I do so with hotel details to refresh my memory as to what the amenities are. I print directions if we’re renting cars or trying to get from Point A to Point B. Google Maps has a text-only feature which you might find very comfortable to use.
I keep everything organized in separate folders so that my various trips don’t get muddled up with each other. I leave a copy of my itinerary with friends or family. It’s always helpful to have somebody know where you are, what flights and where your hotels are.
Finally, I would say with the economy the way it is, you might want to even just consider what they’re calling a staycation these days. You can do something in your own area. If you live downtown you might want to go to a resort out in the country. If you live in the country you might want to go downtown and do something for a night or a day. So, consider a staycation.
On the resource list that I’ll be providing after the seminar, I have information from the US Department of State on some quick trips for traveling abroad. I’d encourage you to take a look at those because we just don’t have the time today for all of them.
For our Canadian friends—Iheard some chattering before we started—there is a guide to Government of Canada services for people with disabilities and their families. I’ll have the website available on the resource list. Within the US, the National Park Service has something called Access Pass. It’s a free pass for people with disabilities and there will be information on how you can acquire that pass should you want to visit our own national parks.
And then, again, the Trip Advisor information. I’m adding information regarding currency conversion. If you really are going overseas and you’re looking at hotels and pricing in other currency, it’ll help you to go ahead and look at what that means in terms of US dollars. Google maps will be there, weather service, and Kayak. A number of the ones I mentioned today will all be on the resource list.
Time for me to take a breath and hand this off to Sue, who’s going to talk to you a little bit about family planning in terms of vacations.
Sue Melrose
A couple of things that Dawn said did trip a few memories. I’ll get back to those in a minute, but I wanted to talk a little bit about when a family is going on a vacation. The first thing I really want to encourage is to have the blind person totally involved in the planning process.
Often, for example, if it’s a teenager or a child, the family just plans the vacation and the blind person is kind of pulled along and they don’t really have a stake in it or know what’s coming next. I’ll assure you that your child will be much more a willing traveler if you include them right from the start.
A couple of things that I have found is that, if you can, when you’re sitting and looking at a map, get the child to sit and look at the map with you, even it means taking their hand and moving it along the route so that they get an idea that these maps really are telling you a picture of where you’re going to go. They get a little bit of the idea of how a map works and what you can learn off of a map. So sit down and plan and encourage them to learn a little bit about where you’re going to stop and what you’re going to be doing.
Once your plans are fairly solid, you might even make your child a simple little map. You can do it out of string and beads or you can do it out of all kinds of little markers that you can find in the stores. Just simply draw, and keep it simple, where you’re going to be going so they can follow along, too.
As Dawn said, I find that many of the websites for where you’re going give great descriptions and they’re brief and they’re short. If you have a Braille reader, you can Braille them off. They’re usually only a few pages long. Or, at least just sit down and read them with your blind member of the family so that everybody’s on the same page.
Another thing is when you choose hotels, it’s just clear that as a blind traveler, the stress level is higher. You’re in strange places;you have to constantly keep track of your orientation. It’s new events, so think of a hotel that has swimming pools or a walking trail. Something that the person—thewhole family, probably, is ready to do this—can go swimming and vent some energy and get their equilibrium back and get rid of some of the stress that’s built up. I find it’s real important to me to get a hotel where I can relieve some of that pressure, not only to relax, but to vent that energy that’s built up throughout the day.
Also, if you think about it, once you get in a car and roll up the windowsor get on an airplane, if you can’t see out that window, your world becomes very, very small. So, think about how the blind person can entertain themselves while they’re in the car. I have my constant travel bag with me and it has everything I can think of that I can use to entertain myself when the rest of the people are reading their own things or looking out the window or we’re just on a long, lonely road and nothing is happening.
Of course, I have in there a slate and stylus and paper. I might have a magazine that I can throw away later. I have my MP3 player. I’ve had people read some of the descriptions of where we’re going to go so I can keep up on that information. Of course, I also have music and I have books to read. I’m a puzzle user so I carry along little hand-held puzzles of various descriptions. I take a Braille deck of cards.
If you have a young child going along you might want to Braille some notes so you can surprise them with a little note stuck in once in a while to make the trip more interesting. I take a pillow that I can blow up so that I can not have my head flopping around if I want to take a little nap. Of course, the all-important snack, which I am a constant user of. And, again, if you have a child, I would keep back some very special little toys or pick up little things along the way just to keep it more interesting and surprising.
You might think about, when you’re planning your trip, if you want to go to restaurants that’ll have Braille menus. They tend to be the chain restaurants, but not always. Always ask. I ask for two reasons—one, I hope they have one and I can use it, but two, it also educates the restaurant industry about thinking about getting Braille menus. You might actually get them to think that’s kind of cool and they might have one for the next blind traveler.