As I mentioned in one of the older articles, the first international trip we did together as a family was to Mauritius. We checked in to the resort we had booked and obviously being a beach destination, we headed to the beach which was right across the resort.
After having a good time in
the pristine waters of the island nation, we returned to our room extremely tired
with thirst. We reached the resort counter where they sold water bottle and asked
for a couple of bottles. It was a moment of truth for me! All what I learned
about pricing based on demand and supply in my Economics class came full steam.
The price of a bottle of a 500ml water was an exorbitant one, since we were in a
resort environment, in the middle of nowhere in Indian Ocean where literally everything
consumed was imported from elsewhere in the world.
We were to spend the next one
week in that place and the sheer math of water prices threatened to put a large
hole in our budget planned for the trip which we did not anticipate. The next
day, while we were out, an idea occurred to us. We had visited a shopping mall from
where we picked up water in bulk which obviously did not cost as much as the
resort. While in the resort, we still had to buy water from there, we could
manage our budget quite well while we went out supported by the water bottles purchased
from outside.
Life teaches us many things,
especially when we travel. One among them is, there will always be complex
problems with simple solutions.
