Winging It Travel Podcast · Tuesday, July 14, 2026
James Hammond emphasizes the importance of flexibility in travel planning, suggesting that rigid itineraries can lead to missed opportunities. He recounts an experience in Thailand where fixed flight dates prevented him from attending a Formula 1 Grand Prix and a subsequent event. Hammond advises booking a flight into a region and then arranging onward travel locally, allowing for spontaneous decisions and recommendations from locals or fellow travelers.
“The idea here is, um, and I've struggled before, is when I've had, um, my first trip in 2013, I, I think we had sort of set dates for flights. And I now, at the time, with STravel, you can amend your round world ticket, but that's only on, like, international flights, if you like. But we had actual internal, a few internal flights as well that we couldn't change, and unless we just accepted that we lost $100, say. Um, it kind of stumped us a little bit.”
“A classic example is we're in Thailand, um, going to Malaysia, and we wanted to go see the Formula 1 Grand Prix, but at the same time was, um, the Forming Party. Um, so we had to choose really, just because of the timings, but, um, yeah, I can't think like, you want to be more flexible because you want to do all the things that you can do, not to, um, you know, just fix to fly because you have to get out.”
“So, yeah, you don't compromise your activities and places to see by being inflexible.”