Ready, set, go!

Author: Bruce Southerden, GoPal Travel founder

Published: 03-12-2021

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Our days of travel are edging closer. Lots of bookings made. Some already winging somewhere.

Now’s the perfect time to dust off those travel hopes and move into first gear with a great plan for those special places in 2022, put together with shared ideas of a good travel companion.

GoPal.Travel is your ideal starting place and I offer a few simple tips to help :

1. Brush up your member profile. Keep in mind that your best chance of someone else reaching out to you rests on what sort of person you look like to them. Need help? Just click on some other members – you’ll see lots of good (and not so good) profile examples.
2. Be clear : one way we can help you find a companion is when/if someone else does a search, looks at your profile and decides to make contact. However, your better prospects lie in a more pro-active use of our platform. Do some searching yourself, which can be fun, and see who else in our wide global base may suit you. Then take the first step with a brief message. Keep in mind you may not get messages back from everyone and some who do respond may have less appeal to you than others – but that is just part of the search process.
3. Remember that GoPal.Travel has been created with care to ensure that you can look for and make contact with others within the privacy that we offer. You (and all our happy members) are not exposed by your personal details like your phone, email or address details as long as you communicate within the safety net of GoPal Travel.
   
   And then, if/when you feel comfortable with someone else as a possible travel companion it is entirely up to you both to decide to exchange personal details (which nobody else sees) to carry on your conversation and make your plans.
4. We know lots of us have preferences about travelling with someone who lives relatively close by. GoPal Travel has plans to make this easier in future. However, some of our members have wider horizons with companions coming from another city (or even another country) and linking up at a common point in their shared journeys. New friends with quite different life backgrounds, even a new friend with a different language skill (handy in lots of other countries you may be exploring) – or just more interesting chatting over dinner as you travel.

Travelling couples, old school friends and others happily make their plans and go. For so many others everywhere, realising our dreams of exploring new places is a choice – do we go alone (or don’t go at all) or how can we find someone to go with for the simple comfort of having a friend along the way?

I do hope GoPal.Travel proves a good path for you and please just remember, jumping into the process of finding a great companion (next trip together or maybe many more in future) can be a rich, pleasant new experience we, as “single” travellers, will thoroughly enjoy – our special opportunity those others don’t have !

Bruce Southerden, GoPal.Travel founder

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