Woohoo! I just had my first contact with the travel dept. at CCAI this morning, and they were super fast in responding to my questions, even though we are still a few weeks away from TA. Now, I know they'll be johnny on the spot getting our travel set up after we get TA, and I really dont have to do much planning at all if I dont want to. I'm a pro-active kind of girl, and its hard for me to wait till the last minute, and allow someone else to totally plan the biggest trip of my life! and did I mention that I LOVE to travel? and that I LOVE to plan trips? I dont think I've ever used a travel agent, because I so enjoy researching everything myself.
So, I did find out some preliminary things.................
- Since we are a waiting child family, and our child is in a province that does alot of adoptions, we will have the choice of joining up with an existing group or going on our own.
- and I love this...........if we choose to go on our own, we get to choose our own port city! we can do either Beijing or Hong Kong, with CCAI setting up our hotel and guide. If we choose to join a group, however, we would have to meet that group in Hong Kong, but could always do Beijing on our own before that. The difference is that this way, the Beijing leg would be on our own and we would need to set up our own guides etc. (Lotus has a package for 299.00 per person that includes transfers to and from the airport, guides, 4 star hotel for 3 nights, 2 full days of tourning, and 4 meals.--thats a good deal, I think)
- We will indeed be in Guangzhou for the adoption portion of our trip, and this may shorten our required time in country by a day or two or not.
- CCAI prefers their families stay at the White Swan, but they are ok with us choosing the Victory if we are willing to set it up ourselves and be on time for meetings at the White Swan. (the only reason we would consider this is because we could get a huge one bedroom suite for 15.00 cheaper per night at the Victory---than the cost of a standard hotel room at the White Swan.) But.....the White Swan is tradition and convenience, so we may just go for the regular room.
- CCAI is perfectly fine with us choosing to take the high speed train instead of a flight between port city and province as long as we're where we are supposed to be on time.
come on TA!
2 comments:
We want to come with you, so please try and wait for us(:
Just wanted to tell you, because you won't know until you are there, that most of the meeting times at the White Swan are EARLY, like 8 or 8:30.....
How exciting to almost have TA!!! WOO HOO! Oh, and CCAI rocks!
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