{"id":80,"date":"2011-07-16T19:53:11","date_gmt":"2011-07-16T17:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backtothefuture.rtwblog.de\/?p=80"},"modified":"2011-08-08T13:36:16","modified_gmt":"2011-08-08T11:36:16","slug":"its-getting-serious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/backtothefuture.rtwblog.de\/?p=80","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s getting serious&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I booked my flights. Due to hesitating a couple of days we had to move the departure date by one day. It&#8217;s now August 3, 2011, still in time for the tri-expo on Friday, August 5. Maybe it&#8217;s also beneficial for the NYC tri on Sunday when I&#8217;m still on European time, i.e. six hours ahead so that it doesn&#8217;t feel like 2 o&#8217;clock in the morning when I have to get up at 4 sharp (I&#8217;m certainly not an early bird).<\/p>\n<p>Andi from the travel agency is a star, it&#8217;s always great talking to him. When he chats about places in Namibia, the natives who live there, the landscape I really want to go there immediately. Since I couldn&#8217;t remember everything he said we agreed that the next time I visit him I bring my travel books to get some more advice about my route, which is still work in progress (&#8220;advice&#8221; in the best possible way). This guy loves traveling and speaks very wisely about the culture, the nature, everything.<\/p>\n<p>While I was there we were also briefly\u00a0discussing the outlook for travel agencies and whether the internet will eat up their markets. I told him that this is the first time that I use the service of an agency, mainly as I couldn&#8217;t figure out how to compare prices between Round-The-World-tickets and the prices of individually booked tickets (for those who are interested: it would have been more costly with the rtw-ticket-option and also would have included one v-e-r-y l-o-n-g f-l-i-g-h-t). I also told him that the service he provides is superior, really provides added-value for my needs and that I absolutely enjoy talking to him about all these great places. I reckon this is how travel agencies can succeed despite the low-cost competition. Might be a niche-market though and only the fittest survive.<\/p>\n<p>What else? I added some items to the to-do-list, I removed some items from the to-do-list but as a matter of fact it is still growing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I booked my flights. Due to hesitating a couple of days we had to move the departure date by one day. It&#8217;s now August 3, 2011, still in time for the tri-expo on Friday, August 5. Maybe it&#8217;s also beneficial for the NYC tri on Sunday when I&#8217;m still on European time, i.e. six [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1152,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2124],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/backtothefuture.rtwblog.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/backtothefuture.rtwblog.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/backtothefuture.rtwblog.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backtothefuture.rtwblog.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1152"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backtothefuture.rtwblog.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/backtothefuture.rtwblog.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":202,"href":"https:\/\/backtothefuture.rtwblog.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions\/202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/backtothefuture.rtwblog.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backtothefuture.rtwblog.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backtothefuture.rtwblog.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}