Where is the best place to find travel information if you’re not a kid anymore?

No matter how old we get we still want to find great places to travel!
No matter how old we get we still want to find great places to travel!

 

By Oliver Smith-Hedgefield

Travel Review Sites For Seniors

Face it, you and I and many of the people around us are no longer the spring chickens we used to be. Despite the fact that I feel like I am still about 25 years old, well, the fact is, things have changed and I am now a creaky older guy and not able to keep up with the fast pace of youth. Still, I have the same wanderlust and desire to travel, have fun, and drink in life that I did when I WAS a young man.

We want results quickly and we want results that will show us easily where we can go, what it will cost, and all of our options.  Should we take the word of a hotel’s own description of itself?   I think it makes sense to be a little more skeptical. For this, many travelers turn to sites like TripAdvisor which has lists of thousands of hotels, and basically is a platform for millions of people’s opinions of their last hotel stay.

The good thing about these sites is that you can read the profile of the writer—so if they are a 21 year old girl younger than your granddaughter, you can discount what they care about but if they are written by a grey-haired person like us, well, they probably have some of the same concerns as we do. So we’ll give them our attention. Silver Travel Advisor is similar to TripAdvisor,  with many reviews and photos, but only written by and for folks from that age group., Silver Travel Advisor is a website which caters for mature travelers. Because it is run by mature experienced travel industry professionals, Silver Travel Advisor won’t steer you into a loud disco party or a topless pool….they know what you want. On second thought, maybe the topless pool isn’t such a bad idea!

It’s not only hotels you can find that match what you need, like finding a place that doesn’t require you to drag your suitcases up many flights of stairs, but you can also find restaurants, shops, and activities that suit you.  Often one way to tell if the review is going to be relevant to you is to read the biography of the reviewer. Often it’s obvious that they are either very young, or parents with young kids, or like you, a silver -haired experienced traveler who would be interested in similar places as you would be.

A new feature on Silver Travel Advisor are their travel writing workshops, that are offered in central London by two experienced journalists. The program takes novice travel writers through the process of creative travel writing and delves into other interesting aspects such as blogging, the markets, and how to get your stories published.  The next workshop takes place on October 22, 2014 in London.

You can even search for ‘care assisted holidays’ and ‘accessible holidays’ and then read reviews about resorts that take care of people with disabilities, and have provisions like larger staircases, ramps and even over the sand wheelchairs.

Just because you’re a little more experienced and worldly than you once were doesn’t mean you don’t’ want to find that perfect holiday or keep working to fill in everything on your bucket list.  Do the research on Silver Travel Advisor and get out there!

Oliver Smith-Hedgefield

 

Oliver Smith-Hedgefield is a retired professor of Literature who lives in Cambridge, England.