What is the farthest hotel booking you ever did for a vacation. 100 Kms, 200 Kms or more?
Or can we have a vacation right in the city where you live? In my childhood, we went on picnics to parks & waterfalls; later in Delhi, we hiked through city forests & visited the likes of museums. But never did we stay away from home for a night, within the city!
The many reasons to travel!
Suman & I met for the first time to discuss a long distance travel. We traveled to Kasol few weeks later and then into one another’s life. During the first two years of our courtship, we traveled to hills and plains, almost every alternate months. And then there was June, when she travelled all alone for a month, at times away from any mobile network. During those days, I desperately wanted to travel, but only to be with her.
Travel has many reasons & many meanings, i realised it then.
Vacation woes of a married couple
Once we were married, we got so pre-occupied with settling down, our frequency of travel decreased. With more happening at work and less time to spend with each other, we traveled separately or with friends.
Then, we traveled to explore new places together. But now that we are together every night, we wanted to travel to be away from what we were building – our daily life. It is probably then we understood what a vacation meant, in this phase of life.
We were dying to go somewhere and do nothing since last many months! We desperately wanted a vacation.
So when Suman told me about Travel Spice, few weeks back, my brain shouted ‘vacation’. We had just returned from Chindi (Karsog) two weeks back. As always we ended up deciding to explore the place than stay back at the hotel, after spending all that money to reach there – we are chindi (meaning cheap in Hindi) like that 😉
How to steal a deal on your hotel booking 🙂
TravelSpice is an awesome concept, you choose a city & the kind of facilities you need in a hotel you wish to stay – and bid! That is it. TravelSpice will then get a room for you at a hotel which meets your expectation. You could reject & get a refund or go ahead and take that much-required vacation.
We discussed & decided to try TravelSpice out. The daunting task was the ‘Where’! We had just returned from a 5 day trip and broke. It hardly made any sense to sped money to travel again, but we really needed a vacation – to sit & talk to each other. That bonding time which always eludes us.
So we chose Delhi as our destination & selected 4 star properties as our preference. INR 2,578 was spend and we waited for just two hours.
We got The Umrao as our vacation destination – a semi-resort (4 star) property at the edge of Delhi, near the airport. I have always heard of Umrao as it is a much sought out location for weddings in Delhi. With sprawling lawns, a pool, restaurants & spa, it was a great choice.
The nearest vacation in my life
As we checked in, the receptionist was not sure if the booking was legitimate! I couldn’t stop myself from chuckling, the poor chap had never heard of such low room rates at this property. A big win indeed, both the room rate & the cheap thrill in getting that deal!
The room was pretty spacious, though we had a twin bed joined together to form a double bed – but it didn’t matter.
We have never ever reached our destination so fast, and so fresh. To be honest, we didn’t know what to do. So we talked! – and it was a pleasant experience. It’s been many months since we had this kind of deep conversation.
We talked on & on, till it was time for a dip in the pool. They even had a Jacuzzi there, couldn’t get to use it since we were so focussed on the pool. For the next hour or two, we were just floating.
It was weird, even the camps near Parvati (where we fell in love) had never been so comfortable. They were comfortable in a different way, but never in this leisure fashion. We binge watched movies, slept like babies and woke up real late.
Umrao also has an elite club and the breakfast had more people than it could accommodate in its rooms. The food was fine but the restaurant staff were very courteous. We wanted to spend some more time in the pool but decided against it & headed back to our room. After all it is a vacation!
At about 11 AM, we checked out and headed home. An INR 80 and 30 minutes later, we were home with the same feeling of content & wanting (more) after every trip. Who would have thought that we could have a vacation by travelling just about 10 kms from our home!
What is the least you have travelled for a vacation?
disclaimer: The idea of using TravelSpice was suggested by a good friend of Suman. Travel Spice graciously arranged to reimburse our cost of travel for sharing our experience. Not that they had to, we would have surely shared this different kind of vacation with you. We accepted their offer, well it was the month end & we were travel-broke ;).