I am beginning to see the merits of the travel agency. Not any particular travel agency, but the travel agency as a generic species.
There is a certain snobbery about travel agencies. There is a certain disdain for groups of tourists being herded through the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, hats and cameras intact, following a tour guide carrying a red umbrella or a blue flag.
But after planning my upcoming holiday over the past couple of months, I'm beginning to understand the role that they play, and how they make life a lot easier.
Going on holiday with your teenage daughter is not the easiest of situations to be in. We wanted to go to different places, and she wanted to know why we had to go to Granada and not Menorca.
"Because I want to!" is not a valid answer.
So, to try and please the both of us, I had to look into every possible scenario for all those destinations; how to get there, prices and schedules of buses, trains and planes, and how to fit them all in to a very tight schedule.
Then there was the question of accommodation, and its location in relation to anything else.
My daughter wanted to rent a car to drive around, and she had very particular requests for the kind of car she wanted, so I looked into that. I had to find out how to get an international driving license, and even looked up a website about driving in Spain. I tried to plan a route and figure out the distance that we could cover each day, trying to incorporate time for getting lost as a major factor. I suppose if we had the whole summer to do that, and an unlimited budget, we could just hit the road and head off when and where we felt inclined.
I had visions of Roman Holiday and The Talented Mr Ripley flashing through my mind. "How I envy you!" chimed in friends who probably had Mamma Mia-style images of this mother-daughter pair driving around Menorca.
The more information I found out, the more daunting it all seemed, but I was still trying to make it happen until one voice sounded out, loud and clear. "You've never driven on the right side of the road, you can't speak the language, you have no idea where you're going. Forget it!" said Old Deuteronomy, my wise friend who has pulled me back a number of times from the brink of disaster with her matter-of-fact logic.
So I decided to stop trying to please everyone (meaning my daughter). She will have time to take her own holidays in the future, when she can do what she pleases, I reasoned to myself.
I started checking package tour websites, and found a trip that fitted in perfectly with my schedule. It covered every single destination that was on my list, and I wouldn't have to worry about booking trains or renting cars, queuing up at tourist sites to buy entrance tickets, booking hotels, carrying luggage or finding taxis. I even managed to convince my daughter that it would be in her best interest to join me on the tour. I keyed in my credit card details, and became an official tour groupie!
As for the visas, that is a whole story worth a column in itself, but I shall not bore you with the details. Suffice to say, a Schengen Visa is not a Schengen Visa. You would expect a Schengen Visa to any EU country to have the same demands and criteria, but no, that would be way too easy.
With some embassies you can just turn up to submit your application, with others you need to book an appointment. With some, you can go direct to the embassy, with others you have to go through an outsource service. Documentation is hardly the same, nor is the time required to process the visa. Is there any one website that tells you all these things? I've yet to discover it.
So, next time, I think I will just save time, call a travel agent, and turn up with my hat and camera, ready to follow that little blue flag.
Usnisa Sukhsvasti is the features editor of the Bangkok Post.