Once in a Blue (Honey)Moon, Part 1.

I post just about once every blue moon, but Jeni has finally nudged me enough times for me to make a post on the honeymoon.  So we have finally booked most of our Honeymoon to New Zealand!  However, it wasn't all smooth sailing.  We had a few issues along the way.

So we are booking the trip with a travel agent, Lori, who has been great throughout this experience.  We began planning with her by telling her a few things about ourselves and about what we want to do in New Zealand.  She produced a few sample itineraries, which we then grabbed the best of these samples to form the basis for our own trip.  This all went very smoothly.  Then we got to part where we have to make it official...

This step required signing a contract and paying some money.  That is all fine and good, but it was a surprise to us that the contract wasn't with Lori, but with a third party booking company, Travel2.   This tossed us through a loop because we had no contact with this company prior to this contract.  The contract was also filled with lots of fine print gobbledygook which all seemed very scary and like they could mess up our vacation and get away with it.  We read the contract very carefully and all the fine print, and expressed some of our concerns with Lori.

Now you see, we thought that Lori would be booking all of the honeymoon personally (probably because we are naive), so we were a bit shaken and apprehensive by this sudden introduction.  She is actually booking a large amount of the trip through this booking company, Travel2.  We went from feeling super comfortable with our personal contact of Lori, to feeling very abandoned and uncomfortable with this phantom company we had never dealt with.  This almost got us to cancel all the plans we had made and start from scratch, but after a few phone conferences with Lori, we decided to take a bit of a leap of faith.  It turns out that the booking company can allow us to have a package deal with some discounts, and also we can have a local contact in New Zealand once we are there.  I would still probably rather have her hand pick the honeymoon and arrange everything individually, but that is probably too much to ask.

We decided to allow ourselves to trust the process a bit and go ahead with it.  It really does seem like Lori has our backs, even if she didn't quite prepare us that well for the introduction of this third party touring company.

This is getting kind of long and there is more drama to follow, so instead of hitting you with a super huge wall of text I'll save the drama for another post (it'll be soon this time I promise).

To be continued...