What’s your travel personality?

While perusing the Washington Post travel blog, I came upon a post about finding your travel personality for the purpose of finding travel destinations that you would most likely find appealing.  The website in discussion, called Best Trip Choices (BTC), determines your travel personality through a short questionnaire and then provides recommendations for travel based on your personality.  The quiz was developed by Dr. Stanley C Plog, a Harvard trained researcher, based on 30 years of research and has been reviewed in professional journals and textbooks.  The BTC website is founded by Dr. Plog and Bahir Browsh, a lifelong travel industry professional and expert in the field.

You can take the quiz here.  Click on the middle button under the yellow banner near the top.

The range of travel personality types goes from the extreme adventure traveler to the traveler who prefers predictability and stability.  I took the quiz and according to its results, I am a Mid-Venturer! This puts my travel personality second only to the Venturer, the most extreme travel personality type.  Fortunately, my husband’s travel personality type is also that of a Mid-Venturer.  No wonder we travel so well together!

Here is the definition of a Mid-Venturer from the BTC website:

As a mid-venturer, your personality fits between venturers and those more in the center of the personality spectrum (“centrics”). You share a number of characteristics in common with pure venturers. You like to travel, especially to foreign destinations and you seek new experiences and new destinations for almost all trips you take. You are also physically active at home and on trips. But, unlike your pure venturer friends, you don’t want to take such extreme vacations and are more likely to plan your trips-set an itinerary of places you want to visit and schedules when you will be there. You also have more company. About 17% of the population has a personality that matches yours, vs. only 4% for pure venturers.

Your venturesome spirit leads you to seek out unique and interesting places to visit and especially to make each leisure trip different from others that you have taken. You may want to return to a place that seemed interesting but you didn’t have time to explore on an earlier visit, but usually you simply want to try something new. However, there’s a big difference between you and your true venturer friends: you like a comfortable bed at night (no sleeping under the stars), a warm shower, and meals that you can trust rather than taking a chance on native foods.

The description for my travel personality type continues for many more paragraphs and pretty much hits the bulls eye on my travel style.   I love exploring new places, I like to plan everything so that I don’t miss anything, but I also like to sleep in a nice place at night.

The website then goes a step further and recommends travel destinations that might interest me and ranks them from Platinum to Bronze.  The Platinum destinations score highly for almost any travel personality type and includes destinations like Hawaii, England, Australia, New Zealand, and several other popular tourist destinations.  On the other hand, the Gold destinations score highly for my travel personality type and not necessarily others, and include France, Germany, Japan, Chicago, Hong Kong, and so on and so forth.

While I agree with many of these recommendations, it is obviously not the end all be all of travel recommendations.  In fact, I feel that many types would like my Gold recommendations and the website omits many places that I have loved.  Having said that, all in all I think this is an interesting personality quiz to take that might just entice you to consider destinations you might not otherwise look up.

What’s your personality type?  Is it accurate for your travel style?

Review: Royal West Indies Resort

We stayed at the Royal West Indies Resort (RWI) on Providenciales in Turks & Caicos in March 2008 for 7 nights and we were very happy with our choice. This condo resort is located on Grace Bay, where most of the hotels and restaurants on Providenciales are located.

RWI has 8 3-story buildings scattered across a beautiful, lush property that includes two separate pool areas, a gourmet restaurant called Mango Reef, and of course direct beach access to one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Although TCI is a chain of desert islands, the RWI grounds feature lush, tropical flora and fauna.

We stayed in a studio botanical view, which was perfectly suited to our needs. The studio is larger than the typical hotel room, but also includes a small sitting area, a washer/dryer, and kitchenette. The resort has studios, 1 bedrooms, and 2 bedrooms available and they all come with with either a kitchenette or full kitchen depending on your room selection and a balcony or patio. The larger rooms have full kitchens, which saves a lot of money on an island where food is expensive.

Our third floor botanical view.

We found the rooms to be clean and well equipped. The kitchenette had utensils, glasses, bowls, and plates in addition to a refrigerator, microwave, coffee maker and toaster. Detergent is provided.

The bathroom was clean, and even though this is a condo hotel they provide the usual shampoo, conditioner, and lotion assortment for your use.

Since we went during high season, resort umbrellas at the beach were always taken. My tip is to reserve your umbrella before 9 AM if you know you will be lying out all day. During the rest of the year, I have heard this is not an issue. If you don’t get a beach umbrella, you can lie out next to the pool. The sun is very hot in TCI, so an umbrella is pretty much mandatory.

RWI has direct beach access to one of the most beautiful beaches in the world.

There are two main ways to reserve rooms at this resort. You can either book through the resort or any travel agency (Expedia, etc) or you can book through a direct owner of a unit through vacation rentals by owner at vrbo.com. You will typically get cheaper rentals directly through an owner, but the spaces fill up fast. Also, if you book through an owner you only get maid service once or twice a week while booking through the resort of travel agency will get you daily maid service. Once you get there, there is no difference in service quality. I will also note that you should not book through the website because the response is slow but instead use their 800 number.
Overall, we were pleased with our stay here. The hotel’s location was great right on the beach, the restaurant was delicious, the rooms were fairly clean, and it is a good value on Grace Bay.