By Robert Cole, Founder Rock Cheetah LLC

Hello to all the fans of intotheSoup.com. I’m looking forward to contributing my insights about the unpredictable, exhausting, and occasionally incomparably rewarding world of travel.

I am a travel industry professional. What does that mean?  Your guess is as good as mine. Does it mean I travel extensively? Yes, but not necessarily for fun. What it really means is that I know a lot about travel information, travel pricing and how it all flows through the various systems to your travel agent, online travel company or hotel reservation agent. 

This can actually make one quite cynical about the experience. So when my friends at intotheSoup.com asked me to write an article for their new travel section, I thought, Can I make this entertaining & fun? Well maybe if I can help you buy travel better or make travel easier, then that has some entertainment value, right? We’ll see.

Let this be a warning, I look at the travel experience from a very broad perspective – what I call the seven steps to travel enlightenment:

  1. It starts with a moment of Inspiration for a trip, for some people, this may be called a desperate need to escape.
  2. Research is then required to discover and evaluate the myriad of travel options. This can be fun or frustrating depending on your approach. Some people really screw up this step and spend way too much money for not nearly enough quality benefit.  Fortunately, these same people are also generally clueless, so they are blissfully happy with their choices.
  3. Planning comes next – filtering out all the alternatives, and most importantly, compromising one’s dreams to suit the obstinate whims of a traveling companion or a budget.
  4. Validation, that moment of panic when you start asking everyone, including people you don’t know, don’t like, or even those whose views you can’t stomach for help to determine if you have truly created the trip of a lifetime.
  5. Booking is the moment of truth when dreams become a series of scary and interdependent realities – most having obscure, yet egregious, change or cancellation fees.
  6. Travel. Which is supposed to be the fun part until you realize, after having only a fractional amount of sleep due to the stress of completing last minute projects at work, packing, you forgot to make arrangements for (fill in the blank…)
  7. Sharing; to quote Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  Either way, Facebook, Twitter and TripAdvisor will make certain both your social network and perfect strangers will find out about your triumphs and hopefully avoid any pitfalls you encountered.

The cycle then repeats with the sharing providing inspiration for others to travel, enlightened by the experiences of their predecessors.

So what will I be writing about going forward?  Whatever I can think of…  but mostly about things I like or don’t like about the travel experience and how I have learned to make it better, cheaper and easier.  Feel free to contact me with questions or suggestions for topics that you feel would be of interest to the Into the Soup community.

By the way, for total travel industry geeks, I also author the Views from a Corner Suite blog where I talk shop for industry insiders. Click here to read.

You can also follow me on Twitter at @RobertKCole 

 

 

About Robert Cole

The Founder of Rock Cheetah LLC, Robert’s role in the travel industry is to help companies bridge the chasms separating marketing, technology and operations to create best practices and process improvements that benefit the consumer and drive profit. Robert has worked at the VP of Destination Experience for Mark Travel; VP of Hotel & Car for Cendant Corporation; VP of Business Development and Marketing Services for Anasazi Inc.; Director of Electronic Distribution for Budget Group; and Director of Hotel Distribution for Sabre Holdings. Robert is also active in many Travel Industry groups including the Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association, the Hospitality Technology & Financial Professionals, Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International and the Open Travel Alliance.