Top 5 Reasons To Keep Travelling Even At This Global Economy Slumping

The recent global financial meltdown started in US when its real estate market bubble burst and banking instituition went insolvent. Soon after the US, other world’s major financial instituitions reacted fast to slump to a new low and the crude oil price index has dropped to a recording low price since 5 years ago! This chain link effect is further evident in many part of the world’s equity market and hence the global economy are facing a slump.

Many would start to worry about the recession cycle of every 10 years after 1997 and started to cut their daily spending in all respects with beliefs in the terminology of ‘Money Is King‘. Theoretically, the first budget we are going to cut is our travel budget , which is sad for me personally (my travel blog would be less active… ). Nevertheless, my response to it is a big ‘NO‘! We should not cancel our vacation plan. Contrariwise, we should travel more at this moment of global economy slumping . Why? Here are the top 5 reasons (or excuses… *giggle*):

1. So fed up? Go and Relax! - We are having intense pressure in our life and it’s even more during this period. Our already subtle income and assets appreciation has suddenly became negligible and we are so fed up after all the hard earned money depreciated over night! What should we do? Go travel and relax! ;
2. Save monies on Air tickets and Hotel - Especially during the economy crisis, our travel would cost us a lot lesser as all vendors are offering cheap bargain in order to survive. Air tickets, hostel rate, eating-out are all going to be cheaper! ‘Demand and supply‘ rules;
3. Save Energy of offices for this non-productive period - During the economy slump, less demand means less productive in our office and business. What we could do is to shut down office or factory to save energy and Go Travel! (This is a bit ‘hard sell’ mate…);
4. Search for new opportunity - Go travel! Open our eyes and search for new opportunity of new business in abroad. We may find some great ideas in other part of the world that could to be adopted in our country instead, and
5. Stimulate the global economy - Com’on! The global economy is already slumping! Spend more to stimulate the global economy so it could recover faster!! Bravo!

‘What a nonsense excuses!’ At least I feel better with my vacation plan to Shanghai next month . Another 32 days to my 8D7N Shanghai autumn travel… countdown continues…. - Travel Feeder.

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I was shocked when listening to radio this morning that an air plane in Madrid crashed and broke up in flames after failing to take off from Madrid airport which killed 153 people and 19 injured. It was Spanair jet plane MD-82 which is the second largest airline and the largest budget airline in Spain.

According to the Spanish Transport Minister Magdalena Alvarez, the flight JK 5022 was to take 162 passengers including two babies and 20 other children from Madrid to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. It was Spain’s worst plane disaster since a Boeing 747 belonging to Colombian airline crashed in Madrid in 1983 killing 180 and the worst in Europe since a Russian Tupolev crashed in Ukraine in 2006 killing 170.

The tragedy has enlightened me on the safety of air travel which was once considered as the safest public transport in this world. Unfortunately, with the ever rising petrol prices and tougher and tougher competitions among airline, budget airline companies have been striving to survive nowadays. Because of that, I’m just wondering whether they have also compromised the safety standard of their aircrafts and if that is the case, they are jeopardising our lives!

Is it still wise to fly with those budget airlines just for meeting our travel  budget? Or should we re-proportionate our travel budget to accomodate those reputable airlines? Should AirAsia’s slogan “Everyone can fly” be changed to “Anyone wants to fly?” Well, let’s give our silent condolences to all the victims while thinking of the answer…. - Travel Feeder

For those who are following Travel Feeder should have realised by now that some relevant travel tips are being inserted into Travel Feeder’s blog posts whenever we think is appropriate. However, those tips could sometimes be scattered all over the place without being properly organised. I realised the difficulties myself when I was searching for those travel tips that I have written. So I think it would be good to compile those tips that I have written each month and summarise them into this monthly post. For whoever new to Travel Feeder, you might find these travel tips informative to you as an essence of travel. The usual Top ‘5′ is omitted from the title as travel tips written last month are more than that while I don’t want to miss out any of them.

It really took me sometimes to sort them all out….

1. ALWAYS CHECK THE WEATHER SEASON OF YOUR TRAVEL DESTINATION BEFORE BOOKING YOUR TICKET!;
2. ALWAYS IF POSSIBLE TRAVEL DURING OFF PEAK SEASON SO YOU WOULD HAVE BETTER BARGAIN POWER!;
3. NEVER BOTHER TO HIRE CAR AND DRIVE YOURSELF HERE. YOU WILL GET LOST IMMEDIATELY!;
4. Plan you holiday to Bali during June to August only for a clear sky without rain and breezing weather;
5. It is always exciting to keep some souvenirs from the country so we could recall our memory about the place that we’ve been to everytimes we see that souvenir;
6. ALWAYS JUDGE OR ESTIMATE YOUR LUGGAGE WEIGHT CAREFULLY BEFORE BUYING ANYTHING JUST TO MAKE SURE THE CHECK-IN LUGGAGE, IF POSSIBLE, IS STILL WITHIN THE LIMIT OF AIRLINES ALLOWANCE;
7. ALWAYS STUDY THE AIRPORT LAYOUT OF YOUR DESTINATION CITY BEFORE YOUR TRAVEL IN ORDER TO MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHERE YOU COULD DO WHAT AND GET WHAT IN THE AIRPORT;
8. book in advance hostel or Bed and Breakfast (you can try keying in ‘London’ in hostel search panel at my sidebar) which could save you 70% of accomodation;
9. Buy London Pass for 6 days for £117 to get maximum saving on entrance fares and public transportation;
10. Visit London in July or January for great saving on shopping during their 70% off store wide sales;
11. get great late evening offer of 50% on breads in supermarket in UK such as Safeways or Tesco;
12. grab a free newspaper at any railway station to look for any discounted staffs, and
13. Always put priority on items taht could not be bought with money in your packing list.

Hopefully you may find these travel tips useful for your next travel plan. For more tips and guides, you may subscribe to my feeds. - Travel Feeder.

After refreshing my memory in the past posts, let’s have something interesting here. What’s the Top 5 Thing To Do before my summer travel? This simple yet important questions we need to ask ourselve after we have decided to go for a holiday and have already confirmed the location and booked some vacation packages. We need to know these top 5 thingy whenever before we check-in to our flight or go on board or even start our car engine, and, we must be prepared to answer all these question, or do some research if we can’t. So, what actually are the Top 5 Questions To Learn or confirm before your travel departure, so as to fully enjoy your vacation travel? For me, the following things are my recommended top 5’s:-

1. Your Travel Objective
   • No doubt, vacation travels are always enjoyable. But how you want to enjoy it? There are always 2 options: Either to spend every minute of your travel with itinerary to explore as much as every tourist spots of your travel destination; or, take your own sweet time to relax and enjoy every bit of your travel, having fun with a more qualitative approach rather than qualitative.
2. Your Travel Budget
   • Off course, what we meant here is the amount of pocket money you willing to spend during your travel, after taking out those fixed cost for vacation package inclusive of air fares.  With your objective set , you could now budget your pocket money to either explore the destination or tourist spot, trying out different types of food, relaxing in spa or grabbing as much souvenirs as possible. And bear in mind to do some research on the currency exchange rate and their living standard at your vacation destination.
3. The Culture
   • I think this has to be the top of the top assignment you need to do some research on, the culture of people at your destination country or place. You must study to know how people there are living, what’s their attitude towards bargaining in the market, attitude towards the cleaniness, when their shops are closing, how they treat tourists, where they spend their weekend and etc. You definately don’t want to confront the locals with misunderstanding. A very good example was come from my travel to Gold Coast, it was a shame when the car rent shopkeeper became very emotional just because I queried on a ‘what-if’ situation that is supposed to be a very frequent happened situation in Malaysia. On top of these, you should also learn some simple foreign language for that country just in case if you need urgently to ask: “Where is the toilet please?”
4. Travel Maps
   • One of the top thing you need to prepare is a copy of the destination city maps. But don’t worry. It doesn’t mean that you need to be familiar with the city before even you been to the place. Moreover, there is always tourist city maps available upon your arrival to the airport or hotel check-in. All I recommend you to do is to briefly study the relative travel distances between your iteneries and the distance from the airport. By then you could roughly estimate how much time you will have to achieve your objective set. One of the travel tips here I would recommend is to try exploring around the city with Google Maps. 
5. Airport Terminals
   • It is always important but always be overlooked to study a bit on the departure and arrival terminal of travel destination airport. This is to avoid tension or uncomfort feeling when you are about to arrive or leave the country. I have bad experience before that I had to spend 1/2 hour just to confirm the boarding entrance and rushed to buy some souvenirs before checking-in and found out that there are lots of duty free shops in the departure hall! So, in order for you to have piece of mind, just ask around those have been there before some information on the destination airport or maybe you could also check around the airport website or at least check with the beautiful stewardess when you are onboard!

What is you personal Top 5’s?

It is always good to refresh my sweet momory of previous travel experiences here to welcome my readers. I’m so excited to recapture here some of the tips and guides of my posts featured in my first blog as below:-

• A Trip To Gold Coast
  • This instalment is about my Honeymoon trip to Gold Coast, Australia with my lovely wife back in year 2005. It was a wonderful summer travel experience to remember and I want my daughter to read this twenty years later (when she is 20 and start to understand what is ‘LOVE’).In 24th of March, 2005, me and my wife, Jean, reached our lovely international airport, KLIA at 7a.m., just to catch an SIA air Flight, transit in Singapore and reach Brisbane, Australia at local time 5p.m. (Australia is 2 hours ahead of K.L.). Why Gold Coast? We had a few options: Gold Coast, Sydney, Rome, or Venice. We love to travel, firstly. Secondly, we preferred western country with cooler weather, not to say rejecting Asian countries, but as for honeymoon, we presume it would be more romantic to be in those countries (perhaps influenced by the Hollywood blockbuster movies). Thirdly, because of our budget constraints, those are the most “expensive” place that is still under our budget and finally, we preferred somewhere which have a more relaxing environment, and this was why we chose Gold