Strategic vacations

When we started to look at a holiday I wanted to go to Florida and take the kids to the theme parks. There’s just enough time to get it done in two weeks. Of course, she fancied Costa Rica and the kids have been studying the Romans at school to put in a bid for Rome. But really, Rome in the winter?

We knew we’d have to suck up the cost and go when it was school holidays so the dates were set. And then we heard that our friends were coming to Florida too so we decided that would be great. I guess I won that one.

Oh, and the Disney hotels are so close but you know what you’re going to get because they’re pretty similar to Disneyland Paris so we figured it would be cheaper for us all to stay in a house and get a pool too.

We thought about the time we’d lose on the parks, in the traffic, but decided it was worth it and we probably wouldn’t move for the second week. We’d have a pool for the kids right there.

I know it was a gamble with the weather. We only needed it to be dry so I looked at the reports and do you know what? That week has been dry for the last fifty years. It’s amazing that it’s so predictable.

Honestly, I couldn’t have guessed that the kids would have so much fun but the cost of food took me by surprise. There’s nothing healthy to eat at the parks so we had to buy a bag and carry lunch for four every day.

But the second week was lovely. To get away from theme parks and just sit while the kids played in the water was totally unexpected.

I don’t think we had any idea at all what we’d let ourselves in for.”

Clues to the future and the shape of the market are everywhere. It just depends how (and if) you look for them. Read the holiday brochures and everything about Florida is great. Look at TripAdvisor and maybe your plan needs to be thought about a bit more. Look at local planning notices and you can see if the route between your house and the parks is disrupted with roadworks that week and what the travel time will be. Even the weather is relatively predictable from historical data.

Do you know what you’ll be doing six months from now? Probably not exactly. The signs are that it’ll be pretty much the same as you’re doing today, for most people. Unless you look at it differently.

It’s what we do at room44: future thinking. Innovation justified.

www.room44.co.uk Innovation justified.