Why travelers don’t like to answer what their “budget is”.
There is a question that most people hate to be asked about travel.
“What is your budget?”
The question causes anxiety, because costs in Travel vary wildly. There is a gambling aspect to booking travel, especially airfare, but really all kinds of travel. With most things we buy, we have some idea of what we should pay, travel is often surprising (both surprisingly expensive and surprisingly inexpensive in turn)
People look for simple strategies posing questions like.
“Should I book this now, or wait?”
“Is it better to book on this particular day of the week?”
“Is $(insert almost any $ figure here) amount, a reasonable amount of $ for this plane ticket, hotel room, tour, transfer, cruise or whatever.”
There are no simple answers to any of these questions. I look at travel prices all the time, literally hours of my week, every week, are involved in this. Shoot! I Have to guess and I’m really good at it and know what to look for and do this every damn day nearly The only real barometer for pricing on any given travel item is how it is pricing against its competitors. Sometimes booking early screws you, sometimes waiting does. Sometimes what may look expensive to you is actually a great price and sometimes what looks cheap, is actually quite expensive.
So, if I ask you this question. I understand why you don’t want to answer it. No matter how good a deal you get, you are going to want a better one if possible. If you have a big budget, that’s no reason to get taken advantage of. If you have a small one, that doesn’t mean your trip is impossible.
When I ask the question “what is your budget.” I look at it as how can I squeeze the most value out of this budget? . However, if you are worried that some travel people are looking for you to answer so they know how much money they can squeeze out of YOU. Well. Honestly, like any business, there are some people that do want to know how much money they can get out of you.
So while it does make me happy when I get a budget to make the most of, I get why people don’t like answering that question.
For most destinations I have some idea of what things should cost, but I’m often surprised. The world changes and the world travel market is a reflection of that. I was surprised by a number of prices in the standard “Spring Break” markets, which is what prompted this set of blogs.
