In this day and age, we have more options available to us for cheap travel, unusual destinations, fascinating excursions and accommodation ranging from an airport floor to the Ritz’ honeymoon suite than ever before. Even if money and time is tight, all we need is a little imagination…and an internet connection. Don’t ignore your local high-street travel agent, though. Amazing offers and eye-opening travel opportunities are not unique to cyberspace, even in the 21st century.

Once, only those with money went abroad. Then, package holidays opened the doors to the world for even the strapped for cash, but nowadays almost a 1,000 million people travel abroad at least once every year, often at the drop of a hat, and many – like expatriates living in Spain – never went home again.

Low-cost airlines owe their success to the internet, and despite the fact that travel agents continue to be a strong presence on every high street, DIY trips are overtaking package holidays. Anyone who does not take a look on the web before booking their annual vacation could be spending more than they should, and losing out on a long list of potential destinations and tailor-made excursions.

Adding to the phenomena of www.es.lastminute.com and cheap flight sites, now we can consult Wikipedia, the world’s most popular electronic encyclopaedia Wikitravel was first created in July 2003 by Michele Ann Jenkins and Evan Prodromou with the aim of providing a world-wide on-line guidebook and travel agency, in 17 languages including English, Spanish and Catalán and covering 24,000 destinations.

Child’s play
Whizzes on the web are becoming younger by the day. The only site manager of Wikitravel in Spanish, Jesús Rodríguez, is not yet 18 and has been working for Wiki since he was 16. A resident of Alcorcón in the Comunidad de Madrid, Rodríguez will have no trouble paying off his student loan when he starts his degree in Pharmaceutical Studies at Complutense University.

Although his summer job in an ice-cream parlour prevented him from trying out 23,999 of the destinations published, he intends to travel around Madrid taking notes to add to the site.
More people involved in managing the site in Spanish are sorely needed, Rodríguez confides, although Wikitravel in English has become a tremendous success, thanks to its well-voyaged team of writers. A US citizen living in Japan, an ESOL teacher of a similar age to Rodríguez, writes information covering his adopted country.

Rodríguez has recently set up Wikitour, a forum where travellers discuss their experiences on the Wikitravel site, giving those new to their destination a personal insight of what their life will be like for anything from a long weekend to several years when they set foot in their new city or country.

No-frills trips
Expatriates living in this part of Spain who continue to have family or friends living in their native land will be familiar with budget airline sites. www.ryanair.com, www.easyjet.com, www.bmibaby.com, www.flymonarch.co.uk, and www.flybe.com are some of the most popular and, if you book far enough in advance and are flexible with your dates, times and destination airports, can find some incredible bargains.

To save hours wading through websites it is often worthwhile taking a look at www.es.lastminute.com, the Spanish version of lastminute.com which allows you to book flights and hotels from airports in Spain to cities all over the world (click on vuelos for flights only, or vuelos y hoteles for accommodation thrown in). The results include many of the aforementioned cheap airlines, depending on who has the best rate at the time.

Spanish travel sites are cottoning on to the commercial benefits of offering cheap travel, and whereas Spain was once a country where the average family spent their summer holidays in Cullera, Torremolinos, Almería and Torrevieja, the younger generation in particular are heading further afield. The launch of www.vueling.com - which is still in its infancy but nevertheless handy for those living within comfortable distance of Valencia, Sevilla or Madrid airports – is steadily growing and offering cheap deals to European cities including Rome, Brussels, Milan, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Lisboa and Venice, plus many more within Spain. Currently, Vueling only travels to Paris and Brussels from Alicante and there are no flights from Murcia.

As for cheap accommodation, if you would sleep almost anywhere but a bus-shelter to save money, take a look at www.couchsurfing.com - where you can travel free of charge from family home to family home, something more than a quarter of a million do each year – www.sleepinginairports.net which, as the name suggests, gives hints and tips about kipping in the terminal or, if you expect at the very least running hot and your own bathroom, www.es.lastminute.com has accommodation ranging from backpackers’ hostels to five-star hotels in cities worldwide.

Finally, if you are fed up with getting stuck next to someone who snores, leers or chats incessantly on the plane, you can select your own seat-mate via www.airtroductions.com. Register, fill out a profile (look for Ioin_21’s details on the home page, which starts “I am French and I have 29) then enter your flight number, date, time and destination. A list of all passengers currently booked on your flight will come up and, if more people reserve seats before departure, you will be contacted by email.

Is this the end for travel agents?
A categoric ‘no’ is the response from the industry – whilst in the Comunitat Valenciana alone, 70 per cent of people prefer to arrange their own trips via the internet, this does not mean the traditional high-street agency has had its day. In fact, new branches continue to open and the major chains are experiencing highly favourable results.

What is their secret? Well, if you can’t beat them, join them, says Vicente Blasco Infante, head of the Valencian Travel Agencies’ Association. If holidaymakers want to organise their own trips, give them the tools to do it.

In the past, the public tended to book organised package trips with a list of optional excursions set in concrete; now, we want it all our own way. We want to be able to stay in the type of accommodation that best suits us, in a location that appeals to us, and have the chance to go on day-trips to parts of the area that particularly fascinate us.

Travel agents, in response, are now preparing holidays that are completely tailor-made to meet the individual customer’s stringent demands – ‘dynamic packages’, as they are known in the trade. These are, of course, low-cost where possible, and even allow you to select the airline you would rather travel with. Like this, travel agents are no longer simply a ‘holiday shop’, although they continue to operate this very vital function. They are becoming highly professional ‘travel consultancies’. “In the same way that a chemist can advise you about the advantages of a determined medication, we advise, orientate, and search for what best suits the client,” reveals Blasco Infante.

Naturally, even where travel agents struggle to undercut the prices of internet-based voyages, they have a wide range of trips at their fingertips with a wealth of exciting excursions. Bespoke holidays are still easier to pick up here than on the net, even if they cost a little more. Likewise, we are more likely to become aware of amazing bargains by seeing them in a shop window, even if ultimately we book them on the internet.

The two industries work together, rather than against each other, and the end result is that now more than ever before – and however strapped for cash and time we may be – the world really is our oyster.