VIDEOS

Context

I’m a visual impaired person that likes to travel a lot. My sight is about 7% of the sight of a typical person. During my journeys I visited a lot of countries (I stopped counting at 50), I met a lot of people and explored their traditions.

Trying not to forget all my experiences and in order to help others to travel easier and safer, together with my friend Corina, we created a travel blog: babilontravel.net. It contains a lot of information about our journeys, nature, traditions, emotions, food of course and many other things. Between them, there are two articles referring to how to organize journeys, as a person with visual impairment, or typical.

Plan:

Plan your trip ahead of time. It is ideal to make reservations six months in advance. Increasingly, the three months in advance, as I am used to planning my escapades, are no longer enough. Generally, booking a hotel online does not cost anything and it can be modified later for free, until a few days before check-in. Not the same is the case with airline tickets. Here any subsequent modification costs and not little.

Try to plan the out-of-season trip, but in a climate-appropriate time frame.

I have always been of the opinion that a successful journey is one that combines relaxation (at the beach, pool, skiing, etc.) with the exploration of new territories, natural, urban or human. That is why I recommend you consider a few days of sweet lighthouses, spiced with others to visit cities, historical, architectural, artistic, natural, etc.

If the purpose of the trip is for business, don't forget to plan at least half a day to visit the city you are in. Otherwise you risk visiting the same city several times without knowing that you have passed there (not a joke but a real case).

With the start dates above you will need to set:

Organize:

Transport

If you do not change the continent and the country / countries you want to visit are not far away (eg Hungary, Bulgaria, Austria), the train or bus seems the best solutions.

For longer distances, consider the aircraft. You will need to locate the most advantageous flights both in terms of price and location (skyscanner.com).

Accommodation

There are many accessible websites on the internet that offer you the possibility to book a hotel room online. When booking, keep in mind the following:

- Read reviews from other tourists who have stayed at the hotel for which you want to make your reservation;

- If you travel by car, consider the parking spaces at the hotel or in the vicinity and their price. Sometimes you will win if you choose a more expensive hotel, but with its own free parking space.

- For a disabled tourist, the centrally located hotels, in historic areas, are the most suitable, but the access routes to them can be narrow and twisted. Therefore, it is sometimes preferable for a hotel located on the outskirts, which, at the same level of comfort, is much cheaper and which is close to the public transport.

If you stay more than 2-3 days in one place, try to rent an It is much cheaper than a hotel room and, except for room service, it is much more comfortable.

Personal tour guide

To make the most of the time visiting various tourist locations, it is particularly useful to create a personal tour guide, which will include the sights to be visited, along with a brief description and useful information, such as operating hours, ticket price, address, etc. Using a text to speech application you can transform it into an audio guide.