Somewhere Between Here and There: What I’ve Learned About Travel

When I think about the trips I've taken over the last few years, I can remember the big things. The places, the hotels, the courses, the restaurants. But when I really think about it, the moments that come back to me are usually much smaller.

It got me wondering: what is it that actually makes us remember a vacation?

When I left school, I hadn't a clue what I wanted to do. I liked travelling, so I thought, sure, why not study Tourism and Digital Marketing? That was genuinely the extent of the decision. I didn't have a five-year plan. I just liked going places.

Seven years later, I'm still in travel, and somewhere along the way I've started looking at it very differently. At GreenGolfBall, we spend our days putting trips together for people who have often spent months, sometimes years, looking forward to them. After 25 years in business, we know that getting a client from A to B is the easy part.

It's everything in between that matters.

When you're travelling yourself, you see the finished experience. The hotel, the restaurant, the transfer, the places you visit. What you don't see are all the decisions that went into making those things work together.

Sometimes it's €100 that makes the difference.

Not because spending more automatically makes something better. It doesn't. But sometimes that extra €100 gets you something you'll appreciate every single day of the trip. Other times, you'd be better off keeping it in your pocket. The trick isn't spending more. It's knowing when it actually matters.

Sometimes it's twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes further down the road might put you in the middle of a brilliant town rather than somewhere where you need a taxi every evening. Suddenly you're walking to dinner, finding a pub afterwards, wandering around and actually experiencing the place you've travelled to see.

Twenty minutes doesn't sound like much until you realise what it gives you.

That's why the little decisions matter so much to us. Sometimes the best decision is to add something, and sometimes it's to take something away. An extra night. A private transfer. A better-located hotel. Or simply an afternoon with nothing planned at all. That last one is probably something I appreciate more now than I ever did.

Golf is obviously a huge part of what we do, but golf actually made me think more about travel as a whole. The course might be the reason someone books the trip, but it isn't necessarily what they talk about when they get home.

It might be the pint afterwards. The driver who had the craic with them throughout the trip. The restaurant someone recommended. The town they wandered around after dinner. The scenery between two places. Sometimes it's everything around the main event that makes the trip.

I think that's true of travel in general. Some of the best moments are the ones you never planned. A conversation with a local. A restaurant you nearly didn't go into. Taking the longer road because you have the time. Sitting somewhere beautiful with nowhere else to be.

Those moments don't always make it onto an itinerary, but they're often the ones that stay with you. Luxury is not simply about having the most expensive version of everything. It's about how the whole experience feels.

A five-star hotel is wonderful, but a five-star trip is something different. It's when the pieces fit together. When the journey between places feels effortless. When you've got time to enjoy where you are. When someone has thought about the details you haven't had to think about.

That is my favourite part about travel: the decisions nobody sees. If done properly, the guest doesn't know why something works. They just know that it does. While there are moments you can’t plan for, you can make decisions that make magic more likely.

When people come home from a trip, they rarely remember the booking confirmation or exactly what they paid for the transfer. They remember the view from the room. The restaurant. The laugh they had over dinner. The place they discovered. The story they still tell years later.

Seven years ago, I chose Tourism and Digital Marketing simply because I liked travelling. I never expected I'd become so interested in what makes a trip stay with you.

And I think the longer you work in travel, the easier it could be to become immune to it. A hotel becomes a booking, a transfer becomes a pickup time, an itinerary becomes a list of logistics. For us, every trip matters, and we never want to lose sight of what that trip means to the people taking it.