Home Countries of Europe How hotel guides breed package tourists. So, meet! Top hotel guide tricks

Countries of Europe

How hotel guides breed package tourists. So, meet! Top hotel guide tricks

When you are looking forward to something good, your body releases the hormone of happiness - dopamine. Take advantage of this. Start planning your trip yourself to get more pleasure from the trip, and at the same time save money and nerves.

Plan ahead

Start preparing six months before your trip. Immediately after choosing a country, buy round-trip tickets - this will mark the boundaries within which you will plan your trip, and also save money, because it is always cheaper to buy tickets in advance.

After that, find out the country of departure. If needed, apply for it on the website of the embassy. Come at the specified time to the embassy or visa center with all the documents listed on the website. Usually a visa is made from two weeks to a month. When you finish all the boring bureaucratic procedures, the most interesting part of the preparation will begin.

Explore the country through social networks

Start preparing by searching for images in a search engine or on Pinterest. Enter the name of the country where you plan to go in the search box of the social network. She will give you photos of the most picturesque places taken by other travelers. So you can immediately understand what you want to see with your own eyes, and what you can do without, determine which attractions are especially popular, and find unusual places that not every guide will tell you about.

For example, this is how I found Mount Adam's Peak in Sri Lanka, which is located at an altitude of 2,234 meters above sea level. Buddhists believe that the Buddha left his mark there, and the monks climb there every year. Guides do not offer excursions to this mountain, so you can only get to it on your own. And it's worth it!

Watch videos on YouTube. When we were in Peru and descended from the mountains after a four-day hike to Machu Picchu, my husband and I really wanted to drink delicious and inexpensive coffee. For everyone, this path ends the same way - in the village of Aguas Calientes. There are insanely high prices in cafes for travelers. After an hour of searching, I remembered the video of one traveler: she said that on the second floor of one of the buildings there is an inconspicuous market with low prices. There we drank excellent coffee and bought water and biscuits for the journey to Cusco.

Read what they say about places you like

In the photographs, you may like the beautiful lake with rose water or in the form of a tree house. Read how to get there and what reviews other travelers have left about the place. Routes can be found on the Vinsky forum, reviews - on TripAdvisor. It may turn out that you will have to walk half a day through the wild tropical forests to get to the hotel, and the lake may turn out to be someone's invention. Calculate your strength and check the facts.

Find friends in the country you plan to travel to

You can use Instagram or Facebook. Or see who is looking for a place to sleep in your city on CouchSurfing. This is a service for travelers around the world to find free accommodation and meet locals.

Before a trip to Peru, Anna, a Peruvian, stayed with us like this. Thanks to Anna, we learned that the safest areas in Lima are Miraflores and Barranco. At the same time, the coolest parties are held in dangerous areas and you can get to them with the locals, who are easy to find on the same CouchSurfing.

Make a route

Redraw the outline of the country in a notebook, mark the planned places to visit. This will make it clearer how to build a route.

I usually build a route in the form of a vicious circle in a clockwise direction: from the lowest point on the map, I go up, and then go down. Many travelers use this method. I don’t know how else to explain that from city to city we always meet acquaintances from the beginning of the journey. Communicating and sharing routes, we always find out that we have the same plans. The main goal of such tricks is to build the route most efficiently, spending less time and money on the road.

Write down the coordinates of the places you want to visit according to the scheme: name, city, address or location, phone numbers (if any).

Write in English or in the language of the country where you are going so that you can show passers-by and ask where to go.

Take care of your comfort: food, accommodation, luggage

Following the route, you will stop all the time in different hotels and cities. Set aside two or three days for each city, depending on the sights you plan to visit.

Since you won't have to stay there for long, you can experiment with housing formats. For example, in one city to stay in a noisy party place, in another - to book a room in a luxury villa, in the third - to spend the night with one of the locals. Booking, Airbnb and already familiar CouchSurfing will help you with this.

Think ahead about where you will eat. Explore the Entertainment, Accommodation and Restaurants tabs on TripAdvisor. Write down the names and addresses in a notebook. You probably won't need them, but it's nice to see familiar names in a city that's far away from your home. You feel like a local.

Try not to take too many things with you. You will be more mobile if you have only the essentials with you.

Take care of moving within the country

Study the transport on which you will move between points on the map. Usually, it is enough to enter the name of the country and the method of transportation you have chosen in the search engine: train, bus, plane, rented car, and others.

Buy tickets in advance. If you do not want to buy in advance - find out and write down how and where to do it when you arrive in the country.

Just check until when you can buy a ticket. It was a shame when we did not buy tickets for the scenic railway from Kandy to Nuwara Eliya in Sri Lanka in advance, and on the spot it turned out that they were sold out in a month. Don't repeat our mistakes.

Make your guide

Gather all the knowledge about the country and your itinerary in a guidebook. You can color it in, paste in colorful illustrations and clippings, write down all the information you need and even basic phrases in the local language.

I always do this when preparing for a trip. My guidebook always contains all the key places to visit, addresses, phone numbers and important information.

Instead of a conclusion

Once a year, my husband and I travel according to the described scheme. We don’t like to sit in one place, so during the standard two weeks of vacation we have time to visit 4-5 cities and explore all the sights of interest to us. Such a regime requires a high degree of discipline and clear planning, but gives us freedom, because all these plans are ours and we can change them as we please.

In half a year, we manage to tune in to the country and come there as relatives. And in the guide I paste all the tickets, checks and other commemorative papers from the trip. Then I put it on the shelf, and it becomes part of our family history.

Story

The forerunners of guidebooks appeared in antiquity. According to the principle of a guidebook, for example, a book is built ancient Greek historian Pausanias"Description of Hellas", which examines in detail the sights of the Greek regions and cities. The prototypes of the guidebook that existed in ancient Rome, the road builders (Itineraria), were of two kinds: 1) Itineraria adnotata or scrípta - road schedules that contained only names and distances to places along a known path; 2) Itineraria picta, consisting of measurements of distances and geographical maps.

In the Middle Ages, literary works were created containing descriptions of routes for pilgrims. Two genres of such literature can be distinguished - the actual guidebooks (practical information and recommendations on the route) and " walking» (descriptions of completed trips). The first of the medieval “guides” that have come down to us is considered to be the Bordeaux Traveler, compiled by a resident of the city of Bordeaux, who visited Constantinople and Jerusalem in 333. The first part of the book is occupied by a listing of settlements on the way Bordeaux-Milan-Constantinople-Jerusalem, indicating the distances between them. The second part of the essay contains a brief description of the Palestinian holy places, some monuments of biblical history, their location is indicated.

The oldest known examples of this genre in Ancient Rus' are the “Life and Journey” of Abbot Daniel to Jerusalem and the Holy Land (beginning of the 12th century), unique in its historical value, and “The Book of the Pilgrim” by Anthony, Archbishop of Novgorod, about his “Journey” to Tsargrad (end of the 12th century). And the most famous and probably the most perfect - " Journey across three seas» Tver merchant Afanasia Nikitina. The abundance and reliability of the factual material in his notes was for his time a valuable source of information about India and Persia. This outstanding work, thanks to the observation and literary gift of the author, of course, goes beyond the scope of the guidebook, it is recognized as a significant monument of ancient Russian literature, translated into many languages of the world.

At the same time, a certain utility of the genre remains. The affiliation of this or that work to guidebooks lies precisely in the author’s desire to suggest a “way”, to explain how it is easier to get there, and so on. For example, “A detailed description of the route ... from Ruschuk through Shumla ... with an indication of the way to guide and feed from 30 to 40 thousand troops” is clearly written with the aim of enlightening those who will lay this route. This also includes address-calendars, for example, the famous address book of St. Petersburg Georgi. A number of other guidebooks are compiled more to help the reader find what they are looking for, and therefore focus on descriptions. Sometimes this is done in a beautiful literary and artistic form. These include "Pocket Book ..." about Strakhov's Moscow.

On the contrary, those publications where the emphasis is on descriptions of events, not in relation to the utilitarian value of this information, can be attributed to memoirs. However, genre boundaries are vague and conditional. The initial stage of the tradition of publishing full-fledged guidebooks in Russia can be attributed to the end of the 18th century.

The beginning of the modern stage in the history of the development of the guide as a genre of geographical literature and as a special type of book publication is associated with the name of Karl Baedeker (1801-1859), who founded in 1827 in the German city of Koblenz a publishing house of guides to various countries, their capitals and other cities. His guidebooks were very popular in Europe, translated into many languages, the title " Baedeker" has become a household name for publications of this kind, including in Russian. It was the "Baedekers" with their scrupulous approach to the selection and display of information that served as models for the best Russian guidebooks of the mid-19th - early 20th centuries. Along with translated compilations from the "Baedekers" and other similar publications, Russia also has its own luxuriously published guidebooks to foreign countries "Russian Bedeker", equipped with "a detailed description of the country with the application of many plans and multi-color maps, including a large topographic map" (see ., For example, ). The format and bright red bindings leave no doubt - their creators were inspired by the Bedekers' books. The further development of the genre was closely connected with the emergence and development of transport infrastructure (primarily railways and steamship communications). Travel for entertainment (that is, tourism itself) has become available not only to the privileged strata of society, but also to the middle and even low-income part of it. There were also guidebooks that met the needs of new travelers. They did not differ in completeness of information, a large number of attached maps and diagrams, and high quality printing. But in them at an affordable price it was possible to find a set of geographical, historical and other useful information that is practically necessary for a traveler.

The first Russian guides

A detailed description of the route of the emergency and plenipotentiary Russian imperial embassy, after the Peace of Jassy, from Ruschuk through Shumla to Constantinople, in 1793 year. With military remarks about the land, with an indication of the way to spend and food from 30 to 40 thousand troops / Note. ON THE. Osokina // Russian antiquity, 1878. - T. 21. - No. 1. - S. 100-124.
Strakhov N.I. A pocket book for old men and women coming to Moscow for the winter, brides and grooms, young and outdated girls, dandies, heliporters, drags, players, and so on. or Allegorical instructions and advice for them, written by the writer of the Satirical Messenger. – Ed. 2nd. - Part 1. - M .: Univ. type., in Ridiger and Claudia, 1795 . – 107 p.

Series of guidebooks in Russian

Insight guides
Le Petit Fute- more than 100 guidebooks
National Geographic Traveler
Nelles Pocket - 24 guidebooks published
Gourmet Atlas
Poster - 21 guidebooks published
Around the world - more than 120 guidebooks published
Golden Globe (on with small brochure attached)
Culinary Guide Berlitz
Polyglot- about 130 guidebooks
One hundred ways - one hundred roads
Your guidebook (a series of guidebooks by K.Gensha) - 12 guidebooks have been published

Notes

Wikimedia Foundation. 2010 .

Synonyms:

See what "Guide" is in other dictionaries:

Guide … Spelling Dictionary

GUIDE, guide, husband. (book). 1. Leader, leader (obsolete). Let me be your guide. 2. A book containing information and instructions necessary for a trip, travel. Railway guide. || Any reference ... ... Explanatory Dictionary of Ushakov

Cm … Synonym dictionary

guide- guidebook: A directory containing information about any geographical point or cultural and educational institution (event), arranged in an order convenient for following or viewing. Source … Dictionary-reference book of terms of normative and technical documentation

GUIDE, me, husband. A guide about what historical place, museum, tourist route. P. around the city. P. in the Moscow region. P. in the Hermitage. Explanatory dictionary of Ozhegov. S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova. 1949 1992 ... Explanatory dictionary of Ozhegov

Guide- The guide consists of ten articles summarizing Lem's views on issues that he repeatedly addressed in his texts and which he approached as problems. The frequency of circulation in itself cannot be an argument Lem has ... ... Lem's world - dictionary and guide

Reference publication containing information about the country, city, tourist route, historical and artistic monuments, etc ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

guide- A directory containing information about any geographical point or cultural and educational institution (event), arranged in an order convenient for following or viewing. [GOST 7.60 2003] Topics of the publication, main types and elements of EN ... Technical Translator's Handbook

Guide- ref. a publication that helps to see the sights described in it, museum exhibits, streets and squares of cities, etc. Its composition is often subject to recommended viewing routes ... Publishing Dictionary

I; m. A reference book containing information that helps to navigate a trip, travel, in a museum, etc. P. around the museum. P. around the city. Brief paragraph on the Hermitage. Use a guide. Purchase item. The route was chosen according to the guidebook. * * *… … encyclopedic Dictionary

There are many very detailed travel guide apps for smartphones and tablets. However, the good old paper guides have not lost their relevance either, as they do not require recharging, do not slow down and do not freeze. And the text written on paper is often perceived better than electronic. We will not give preference to any one type of guides and consider the best guides whether in print or electronic form.

10. Google Trips

Russian language: no.

Cost: free.

Opens the rating of popular travel guides with an excellent mobile application for iOS and Android, which contains information about all the popular tourist destinations in the world. All available information is sorted into sections: Food, Attractions, Interesting information and so on. You can read the comments of tourists about places where it is better to go, or vice versa, it is absolutely not worth visiting. The program is integrated with Google Maps, so that the most detailed maps will be at your service anywhere in the world. The routes proposed by the program can be changed at your discretion: change the number and composition of objects, reduce or increase the duration of the tour and make notes. And if there are notifications about booking tickets in your mailbox from Google, Google Trips will show the flight and departure time.

Minuses: no Russian.