Booking ahead - Gap Years for Adults

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving” - Lao Tzu

This is an exceptionally difficult one for me. We all know the logic of booking ahead. You get much cheaper and better deals by booking well in advance and you have loads of time to do your research about the accommodation, locality and environment. It makes sense.

BUT > > > >>>

Very early on in the trip I learnt the error of booking and paying ahead. Our whole trip was designed around going where the mood took us.


We booked and paid for three nights at a Big4 campsite in Paramatta, Australia then wanted to cut short our stay by one night as we had a chance to take the children water skiing.
The camp wouldn’t refund us (Short sighted for them as I flatly refused, in the remaining five weeks of travelling around Australia, to stay at another Big4 campsite!)

As my budget was tight, I couldn’t justify paying twice for one nights accommodation so we missed out on what could have been an amazing experience.

Subsequently I never, ever arranged, booked and paid for anywhere for longer than two nights apart from the Cook Islands and our Home Exchange. While this posed some risk of not having accommodation when we arrived it was a risk I was prepared to take and it paid off as far as I was concerned giving us complete freedom to go where we wanted and when. Also if we heard that there was a festival 50 miles east of us and we were heading west, we simply headed west.
We all enjoyed that freedom enormously.

For me the whole trip was about new experiences and to miss out on a good one and learn a tough lesson was memorable!

So - Booking Ahead - I still haven't got the perfect answer but if you tend to be more like me and want to go where the mood takes you I found that not having accommodation arranged wasn't the end of world and we were very seldom stuck for somewhere economical and nice to stay.