10 Essential Questions to Ask Before Booking Your Next Vacation

It seems every adventure travel company promises the best guides, the best food, the best service, but do they provide a safety net for the unexpected? Here are a few suggested questions from Jim Sano, president of Geographic Expeditions, to ask to help make sure your backside is covered.

1. Do you provide around-the-clock logistical and air support services? (this is especially important in the event of cancelled, delayed or changed flights?)

2. Do you include medical evacuation, expense, and assistance coverage, with access to a board certified emergency physician?

3. What assurances do you provide to protect my travel investment?

4. Do you accept major credit cards?

5.  Are my deposits and payments placed in a U.S.-based financial institution or an offshore entity? 

6. How will you protect me from currency rate fluctuations? (Some international currencies have fluctuated by as much as 40% over the past 12 months) How to do mitigate the fuel surcharge risk?

7. What are your payment/cancellation terms and conditions? What are your cancellation policies in the event of a U.S. State Department, Centers for Disease Control, or World Health Organization travel warning?

8. Do you offer optional trip cancellation/interruption insurance, including cancel for work reasons?

9. Does your company participate in a U.S.-based seller of travel/consumer protection program?

10. Does your company possess current liability insurance with an A-rated company?

Source: Choosing the Right Adventure Travel Company; Canadian Mountain Holidays, The Adventure Blog.

How To Survive Reentry After The Vacation

The worst part of travel isn’t the security checkpoints with prison-issue wands, puffs of air blowing in your face or gloved agents pawing through your belongings. It’s not the airline seats with their lumbar supports that spear your spine or the $2.25 you pay for a small bottle of filtered tap water at airport restaurants.  It’s not the jetlag—which can be so brutal that your left foot doesn’t know where your right foot is walking—or the suitcase that vanished with the travel clothes, gadgets and gear you have spent half a decade assembling.

The worst part of travel is actually coming home. One day you are in Peru, gaping at Machu Picchu or in the Canadian Rockies, heli-hiking amid the granite spires of the Bugaboos. Maybe you’ve been cycling in Italy, trekking in Nepal, cruising down the Nile in Egypt, or sauna hopping in Finland. The next day, you open the door to your digs and…chaos.

The answering machine is blinking, there are hundreds or thousands of emails, the snail mail spills over the edge of a huge tub and stares at you from the floor.  There are bills to be paid, deadlines to be met, appointments to be kept. Your hair needs new highlights, your car is due for servicing, there’s a leak in your office, you forgot to send your sister-in-law a birthday gift. The exotic fades as you slip into the quotidian and start trouble-shooting, catching up, returning calls, and squirming in the dentist’s chair.  Hooray! You are home.

I have not yet figured out how to make homecoming a celebration.  But I have a few tips if you are as overwhelmed as I am when you step over your own welcome mat.

Click to read more >>



Six Tips for Traveling With Your Spouse

“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it”  ~John Steinbeck

Sure, you vowed to love each other “for better and for worse,” but who said anything about trekking Machu Picchu, tackling a via ferrata in the Canadian Rockies or a culinary bike tour through Tuscany, for that matter? For many, adventure travel wasn’t what they had in mind when they promised ‘til death do us part’.

In nearly two decades of marital globetrotting, I’ve learned a thing or two about traveling with the one you love. In fact, my married life started when my now-husband, Hank, and I eloped during a 3-month vacation. Two years later, we packed up the Subaru and didn’t return home for more than a year. And for the past decade we’ve divided our time between homes in Old and New Mexico.

But, I hadn’t really thought about what works - and what doesn’t - until recently when the adventure travel company Canadian Mountain Holidays asked me to write about the topic for their Adventure Blog. 

In addition, I put the word out to my, facebook friends and twitter followers, asking for their best strategies for how to travel together AND save the marriage.

So, what’s the the secret? You may be surprised! For a collection of our best advice READ MORE

What about you? How do you keep things cozy when traveling with the one you love? Share a comment below, on my Facebook page, or tag me on twitter to continue the conversation. I’d love to hear your thoughts.  

About Ellen Barone: Consumer travel expert Ellen Barone is the founder and publisher of TravelUpdatesbyEllenBarone.com and YourLifeIsATrip.com. She’s currently at work on her first book - I COULD LIVE HERE. Click here to learn more or stay connected on Twitter at,Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn. 

12 Travel Mistakes Not to Make From Fodors.com

Travel mishaps can happen to even the most seasoned travelers. When one frustrated Fodor’s member recently vented about booking the wrong flights for an upcoming trip, several fellow Forums posters empathized by disclosing their own slip-ups. Check out some of the do’s and don’ts that came out of this group confession.

From Fodor’s Forums: What’s your biggest travel mistake?

1. Do look carefully at flight times and dates before booking.
2. Do hold your tongue and check your flight’s seating chart.
3. Don’t postpone travel to a destination with favorable currency exchange rates.
4. Don’t cancel the credit card tied to your reservations.
5. Do take a good look around your car before setting out on a road trip.
6. Do a mental run-through of your departure day ahead of time.
7. Do consider the season of your destination.
8. Don’t assume just any hotel in a beach destination will do.
9. Do book a room for every night of your stay.
10. Don’t assume your hotel room’s rate won’t change.
11. Do update your driver’s license.
12. Do carry a good map with you at all times.

To read the full info-packed article, complete with reader tips and explanations, click here.

For more great tips; up-to-the minute travel advice and trip planning information; user ratings of thousands of sights, hotels, and restaurants; and one of the most established and lively travel communities on the web, visit Fodors.com.

Source: Fodors.com

Escape Your Location: How to Become Free From the Office

One of the best aspects of my life as a freelancer is the freedom it provides. I can (and do!) work from anywhere in the world. Have laptop, will travel…

But you don’t need to be a writer to escape the confines of your location. If you’ve ever wanted to be free of the office and do your work from anywhere in the world this Zen Habits article offers 10 great tips for making the dream a reality and becoming a “Location-Independent Professional” (click the link below for the full article):

1. Dare to dream. The thing that holds most people back is that they don’t allow themselves to dream. Sure, it might be a passing fantasy, but they don’t give their dreams a serious thought. But what’s to stop you? Money? Fear? Overcome those measly little obstacles and allow yourself to dream.

2. Discover your passion. Many times, it’s not enough to just do a job from wherever you please — it’s best if it’s a job you love to do. I’ve written about this before (Finding Your Passion the 10th habit in Zen To Done), but I think many of us get stuck in a job just because it’s what we’ve been doing … without thinking about whether it’s something we love to do. This year, I’ve discovered I’m passionate about blogging, about writing, and I’m working to turn this passion into the way I make my living.

3. Do your research. Read about how others have achieved this dream, what steps they took to get there, and what their lives are like now. A great source is Lea Woodward’s new e-book, “X Marks the Spot“. It’s a great read, full of information on how to achieve this independence, written by someone who is actually living the dream. I highly recommend it. Buy it here.

4. Explore your options. What are the various routes available to you to get to your dream? Keep your mind open to opportunities, to new ways of doing things you’re good at doing, or that you love doing. Think about ways to add income streams into your life, instead of relying on a single income stream. Look at ideas that others are implementing successfully, and see if those are good options for you. In the early stages, it can be useful to look into many more options than you’re actually going to choose in the end … and even give a few of them a try to see if they might work for you. See these blogs, to start with, for ideas: Location Independent, Rat Race Escape Artist, and Escape from Cubicle Nation.

5. Lay out a plan. Once you’ve begun exploring your options, you can start laying out a roadmap to get to your dream. Now, understand that this roadmap will change as you go along — think of it as a living document rather than anything set in stone. You’re exploring new territory … it only makes sense that you’ll discover new things, learn as you go, change your mind about some things, and find new options you didn’t even know existed. But the key is to write your plan down … so you have a guide to keep you on track.

6. Consider a gradual transition. J.D. Roth from Get Rich Slowly (he’s one of my biggest inspirations for becoming a blogger by the way) did an awesome post about taking the plunge and pursuing his dream. While the entire post was great, one of the things I loved about his plan is the gradual transition. J.D. isn’t just quitting his day job all at once. He’s weaning himself from the job one day at a time, over the course of a year. This gives him the chance to adjust to all the changes of quitting his job. While you’re considering your options, you might consider this one.

7. Take action. It’s all well and good to make a plan, and to allow yourself to dream, and to consider options and all that — these are necessary steps — but the best-laid plans sitting on a shelf don’t do us much good. You gotta take action. Today. Don’t put it off until next month or next year … do something today to get yourself closer to reality. Then tomorrow, do another thing. One step at a time, you’ll get the ball rolling, and you’ll get there eventually. But without that first step, you’ll get nowhere.

8. Reduce your needs. This isn’t a necessary step, but it’s a good option to consider. Lea Woodward, in the above-mentioned e-book “X Marks the Spot“, says that while she and her husband did reduce expenses, they tried to avoid a “scarcity mentality” … which I think is an interesting idea. But the truth is, if you don’t have as many expenses, you don’t need as much of an income … and that means that your dream is much easier to implement. My favorite book on this is Your Money or Your Life, one of the most amazing personal-finance and life-changing books you can read. YMOYL shows us how each purchase and each expense represents a cost to us in terms of our life … we must work a certain number of hours for everything we buy and spend on. That’s something worth thinking about … are you willing to work extra hours for the things you buy and spend your money on, or would you rather use those hours doing other things?

9. Simplify your work. This, of course, is one of the great themes of Zen Habits (to start with: one, two, three, four, five, six) … but it is especially relevant here. If you want to work on your own, and liberate yourself from the office, you’d be wise to simplify what you do. Eliminate the non-essential tasks, streamline your workflow, focus on the tasks and project and clients with the absolute biggest potential and long-term benefits.

10. Outsource and automate. One of my biggest sources of inspiration, Tim Ferriss’ excellent book The 4-Hour work Week, gives you some great tips on how to eliminate the non-essential and focus on what matters most. But some of the most interesting parts of the book are the sections on outsourcing your life and automating your business. Those parts alone could have been a separate book. They’re not something that everyone will want to implement, but they’re most definitely interesting options that can help many people achieve their dreams.

Click here to read the full article online at  Zen Habits