Hey Ajala!

It’s still June, It’s still my birth-month and my birthday wish is still for you to send my newsletter to 3 of your travel loving friends so they can subscribe :D This and your continued support and feedback is massively appreciated!

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OTAs & Booking Tips

I mention this a lot so thank you for telling me you didn’t know what they are! OTAs stand for online travel agents. They are companies who may have bulk bought tickets or routes and are then able to resell them at a dynamically lower price.

The gain here is cheaper-than-airline tickets, but the trade-off is a headache if something goes wrong. If there's a delay or cancellation, you often will have to go through these middlemen rather than directly to the airline which can be frustratingly slow. Furthermore, customising or changing your flight with an OTA could be more costly than doing the same with an airline.

Where feasible, I advertise the flight deal price from booking direct with an airline, as I believe any price difference less than £50 isn't worth the potential headache. That being said, I've definitely booked through OTAs when the saving has been significant, and I've only been stuck in an airport waiting for customer service once. In other cases where there's been a change in my flight, it's been with enough advance notice that I wasn't stressed about them taking a day or so to confirm my new flight details.

Here's my tips for booking with OTAs:

• Read Trustpilot reviews and pay attention to comments about customer service response times as that's the real signal in my opinion.

• Make sure you're definitely going on those dates and are happy with baggage allowances. Cancelling/changing bookings and adding extras will be more expensive or feel impossible.

• Once booked, double check your flight exists by logging in directly to the airline’s portal with your booking reference and last name. At this stage, change the bookings contact details to make yourself the receiver of airline comms and updates, if possible.

• Contact your OTA to confirm your flight details a couple of weeks before traveling as times may have changed, do this especially if you aren't receiving communications directly from the airline.

• Pray, relax and enjoy your trip!

Ajala-ing with Ottoman Drives

Tom spotted me by chance as we both waited for the chairlift to hike around Rila’s Mountain Lakes in Bulgaria this month. While my trip was firmly within the borders Tom and his friends were planning to continue exploring the previous Ottoman empire by driving to Sapareva Banya and Thessolinki in Greece as well. Bulgaria is a great place to travel through and borders equally epic countries like Greece and Türkiye as well as Romania, Serbia and North Macedonia. These can be driven to or alternatively, I met plenty of travellers planning to take trains and buses - mostly overnight.

@letsgoajala

7 Lakes Hike at Rila Mountain Lakes, Bulgaria So worth it #bulgaria #travel #hiking #sofia #daytrip #naturalbeauty #nature #bulgariaholiday