On almost all the holidays we go on, we like booking our own accommodation, travel and excursions ourselves independently. However on our family trip to Thailand we decided to use a travel agent called Travel Center, who would arrange the whole trip for us – all the flights, accommodation, transfers, excursions – virtually everything was organised for us by Travel Center UK.
We usually prefer booking our own travel independently – getting to choose exactly what we do and when, and having the flexibility to independently research, check reviews and have full control over the travel, so it felt unusual leaving all that planning and booking to someone else.
But having never travelled to Asia before, the whole region would be completely unfamiliar to us.
We were also planning to do a lot of activities and a lot of travel between different regions, so we felt it’d be useful to have guidance from a company like Travel Center who could arrange it all for us and make suggestions as to the best sort of itinerary to meet our needs.
We’d never heard of Travel Center before and weren’t even certain they were a legit business.
However a bit of research into Travel Center reviews and the background of the company soon reassured us and we were impressed with the initial communication we had with them, as we went back-and-forth choosing things to do and places to visit.
We had a mixture of phone conversations and lengthy chats via Facebook Messenger – a process that went on for several weeks before we arrived at final decisions for the trip itinerary, budget and so on.
A lot of this communication happened outside normal working hours – in the evenings and at weekends – which was convenient for us.
We were impressed at the patience of the rep we were dealing with and how willing she was to put a lot of time into helping us with the choices, with no guarantee that she’d even end up with a sale at the end of the process.
Her patience paid off as we did eventually go ahead and book, finalising a family holiday itinerary for Thailand that she originally suggested and which we then made various requests to tweak in order to make the holiday perfect for our requirements.
One of those tweaks was to extend the flight stop-over in Doha, Qatar from a few hours into a three-day stay, in order to break up the long journey there and get to see a country that we thought looked interesting and wouldn’t otherwise get the opportunity to see – something we were really glad we did.
I must admit, when we finalised the booking with Travel Center and they sent through all the separate booking confirmation documents, I started to get a bit worried…
There were a total of 26 separate bookings – from flight bookings to airport transfers, internal flights within Thailand, excursion bookings…
I said to my wife when all the booking documents came through that there was just no way that such a huge number of separate travel bookings can all run smoothly – and that we must prepare ourselves for things to go wrong.
However – and this I think is much to the credit of Travel Center – every single separate booking, apart from one blip with an internal flight, which we managed to resolve quite quickly, worked like clockwork with everything running to plan.
Every driver for every airport or hotel transfer or excursion met us at the right time, the right place – every hotel and flight was booked accurately and our whole two-and-a-half weeks of travel around Qatar and Thailand went like a dream.
Conclusion
So, although we’d braced ourselves for things to go wrong – and although we originally had some fears about putting the whole itinerary of the holiday in the hands of this online travel agent we’d never heard of before, I can certainly say all of those concerns came to nothing and the entire holiday was a real holiday of a lifetime.
Booking with Travel Center took a lot of the admin and responsibility for arranging all the separate elements of travel off our plate, yet still gave us flexibility to tailor the holiday to our exact requirements.
Our family holiday to Thailand was a great success which we all loved and the experience with Travel Center was a very positive one.
In fact we’ve been in touch with them again since our return to enquire about other holidays we’d previously been planning on arranging ourselves, but have now seen the benefit of leaving all the planning and individual bookings with them, saving a lot of time and admin hassle doing it ourselves.