Preparing for travel after the pandemic (part 2)

There’s something magical about getting to know a country and its people. Sure, we all experience cities, culture and perhaps amazing tropical beaches. But what about ‘real-life’?

We get asked this a lot – we attract many curious and imaginative guests. Most likely because they want that something different from the normal sightseeing trips. This might be a couple or group of friends, and increasingly families.

In our new world of post-Covid travel, we’ve looked at how we can improve on what was already very good, so that more time is spent experiencing and less of the trip moving between too many locations.

For many of our international guests from say North America and Europe or Australasia, it’s a long way to our part of the world – perhaps 10 – 15 hours on direct or flights with connections. I won’t get into the how will people travel, because I’m quite confident the airlines will do whatever is necessary with passenger quick tests or whatever – so that everyone on a flight is confident of their health and safety.

We’re really focussing hard on how we think our offer to visitors will be, going forward. We like to think (in fact we know) that we specialise in offering activities and experiences that are different to the mainstream. Sure we like to show our main cultural sites and sights in the main cities and we’ve always tried to balance that with even something as simple as going to a local coffee shop (for coffee –  not Amsterdam style!).

Days in the countryside and villages are always a highlight – getting to see the ‘real Vietnam’ or ‘off the beaten track’ – along with our own committment to supporting local communities with our ‘light touch’ tourism style.

So we’re looking more at less 🙂

By this I mean, not always covering the whole country in one 2-3 weeks visit, which is something like Hanoi, Sapa, Hue, Hoi An, Nha Trang and HCMC – maybe with the Mekong Delta too. Sure it can be done – and has been for many years. And in sone cases still will be planned carefully for our guests.

But we see a win-win in more localised and immersive experiences, perhaps 4 -6 days in different parts of Vietnam (read, northern, central, southern and Mekong Delta) , that can be taken singularly for say our regional guests from Singapore or Hong Kong and combining two or more of these regions – perhaps even with two visits here, over a few years.

Also lets not forget the ‘main sites and sights’. We’ll offer all that is needed, we’ll suggest to omit some very crowded places and will most lilely not go to wet or live markets. Interesting as they can be, I think photographing filed rats and snakes (or whatever), can be supplemented by other things.

This leads us quite nicely to our ‘Detours’. We’ve already offered these in some cities. They are an alternative to the mainstream sites – ususlly visiting more local areas, or lesser known sites. We’ll be working more on developing these Detours and they’ll be described in this blog as we publish the details.

As in the part 1 article I wrote – because we don’t rely on fixed-route scheduled group tours, combining our flexibility, philosophy and knowledge, with listening to our clients ideas and understanding their wants and needs from the trip, will I’m sure benefit everyone in our post-covid world.