Travel Weekly reporter Michelle Baran is sampling two motorcoach tours in Europe: one a highlights tour of several destinations, and the other a regional tour of Milan. Baran is detailing her experiences and observations in dispatches.
Dispatch, Milan -- As I left the European Horizons group in Venice this morning to catch up with Trafalgar's Milan and Italian Treasures tour, I realized that my tour companions are in a very peculiar situation.
They are vacationing, spending large sums of money, in the midst of an unnerving economic crisis in the United States that will likely have repercussions around the world.
If the other travelers are like me, they wake up and turn on CNN International or BBC World News, and they listen to economists discuss the current market crisis and potential $700 billion bailout plan, comparing coming events to the Great Depression.
Nobody wants to hear that when they are on vacation -- especially since many people in the group chose this form of travel because of the value it offers.
Yesterday, during the optional excursion and lunch on the island of Burano off of Venice, I asked the Australian traveling with his teenage daughter why he didn't plan his own trip, since he seems very well-traveled.
He said his reasoning was two-fold. For one, he wanted a more structured trip since he was with his daughter and didn't want to have to worry about driving around Europe, getting lost, etc. But secondly, and most importantly, he said he looked at the prices of the hotels and could have never assembled an itinerary for the price that Trafalgar was offering.
European Horizons starts at $3,635, per person, not including air. The price doesn't include many of the meals on the trip as well as optional excursions. Lunch is never included and neither are several dinners. The idea is to give people some flexibility so they can get dinner on their own in a charming city such as Brussels and grab lunch while wandering the streets of Cortino, Italy, or Cologne, Germany.
But it was all the extras, especially to those for whom this trip was a bit of a splurge, which had people budgeting and, wherever possible, holding back.
In Venice, two Australian couples traveling together told of their plight to find a reasonably priced lunch in tourism hot spots, and the extra charges for seating versus standing. They eventually found a cafeteria-style restaurant where they each paid about $22.
But nothing was as stressful as when the sign-up sheets for optional excursions went around.
There were 12 optional excursions offered on the European Horizons tour, totaling 670 euros, or $979 based on today's currency exchange rate. For some, it was a no-brainer. This was their big trip and they wanted to see and experience it all. Check, check, check. They signed up for the whole kit and caboodle. Whether it was money that was saved or money they would pay back later, who knows? But they had psychologically conquered the cost of this trip.
For others, the negotiations began. You could hear whispering all around the bus. Calculators came out. What was worth it, what wasn't? I heard people look at an optional dinner show and decide it'd be easier to just do their own thing. I heard others grapple with the temptation of a lagoon cruise in Venice or the pièce de resistance, going to a show at the Moulin Rouge in Paris for 144 euros ($210) per person, the highest price for an optional excursion.
I realized that the cost analysis of having a good vacation is a very complicated psychological and emotional process. On the one hand, travelers wanted to have a good time, the best time really. On the other, who knows what awaits them at the bank or at their jobs when they get back home, especially the Americans?
For now, at least, they signed up for whatever good times and memories they could afford.