Things used to be so simple. Back in the day, we were backpackers. We carried all our stuff in a pack, on our backs. Period. Then life intervened. I grew up, got a job, made lots of money, and shifted into luxury mode for the next 20 years. When midlife stole in, I found myself yearning for those simple times when I would slap on the backpack and wander. Before long IÂ was again choosing the backpack over the traditional suitcase whenever I traveled, until one day I chucked it all and headed out to travel around the world for six months. But by that time I was 54 and not willing to carry everything on my back, so I stuffed all my essentials in a smaller pack (laptop, iPod, camera and lenses, wallet, swimsuit, sarong, book, etc.) and the rest in a small, 22″ rolling suitcase.
Throughout my RTW trip, I defined myself as a backpacker – after all, I was carrying some of my gear on my back, staying primarily in hostels, eating on less than $10 per day, and traveling to adventurous destinations. It was during this trip I learned about gap-packers, a term first applied to European students who take a year off to travel between school and university, or between university and their first job. A “gap year” so to speak. Made sense. Since I was taking time off to travel mid-career, maybe I was a gap-backpacker.
Lately I’ve been hearing the term “flashpacker.” The third time I heard the word, I had to look it up. Wikipedia defines flashpacker as follows:
“Flashpacking refers to affluent backpackers. Whereas backpacking is traditionally associated with budget travel and destinations that are relatively cheap, flashpacking … has been defined simply as backpacking with a bigger budget. A simple definition … can be thought of as backpacking with flash, or style. One school of thought defines the flashpacker as a rapidly growing segment of travelers who Continue reading →
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Metasearch Engines Evolving Into Excellent Travel Booking Sites
In the beginning, if you wanted to book airfare online you visited each airline’s individual website, entered your search criteria, and compared the prices, routes, and travel times from the multiple sites prior to booking. Ditto for hotels. It worked, but the process ate up a lot of time and was extremely frustrating.
Sensing an opportunity, sites like Expedia and Travelocity sprung up. These search engines gathered all the information on airfares and hotels and made it available on a single site. That was better, but some things were still missing. In order to read customer reviews about hotels travelers could visit TripAdvisor, but once again that meant visiting multiple sites prior to making travel decisions.
Enter metasearch engines. These relatively new sites incorporate everything into one place, making travel research and booking a breeze. If you’d like to know more, check out the recent post about travel metasearch at UpTake.com. UpTake just happens to be one of the top metasearch sites on the Internet, if not the best. And in the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I am a contracted travel writer for UpTake.com, but then I wouldn’t be working for them unless they were the best.
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