A survey: what’s your pain in planning a vacation?
Monday, September 24th, 2007I made phone calls like crazy yesterday afternoon, trying to book hotel rooms for my coming vacation to Jiuzhaigou, Sichuan, China.
I have spent quite some time research what to do in our destinations during the weekend and was frustrated — since I got a lot of repeated but either useless or out-of-date (You know, everything changes so fast in China) information about the destinaion from search engine (google or baidu). Anyway, I finally set our itinerary and am ready to book hotel rooms. I found our most desired hotel was fully booked. Of course, I can still find a place, a nice place to stay if i am willing to pay RMB 600/night when I can get one for RMB 180 just 2 days’ ago.
In the whole planning process, I spent way too much time deciding where to go and what to do. I want to see the fall foliage, but people have different opinions about where and when. I hope I have a super computer or a super data mining machine to dig all relavant data out for me. Unfortunately, I don’t.
I would like to do a light survey about: what’s your most difficult part in planning a vacation? How do you solve it?
For me, it is to decide which few attraction points to see the most beautiful natural scences in limited time. I will:
1) search google and baidu (in Chinese),
2) go to forum and ask questions (but got almost 0 repsonds),
3) search for travel blogs in either English or Chinese (which need a lot of time to read and filter the information).
Grigo