The Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand. (Shutterstock.com)

Independent travel, rewarding as it is, has its headaches.

These invariably involve transportation and/or accommodations, and are most likely to occur in the biggest and busiest cities.

One solution is a city package. It buys peace of mind and may save you money to boot.

City packages have been around for decades. My wife and I used one for Bangkok during a month-long holiday in Asia. It included accommodations, a private guided tour of the old royal palace, and, most important, transfers from the airport to our hotel and back.

Bangkok at the time was notorious for its traffic jams. It took a couple of hours after landing to reach our downtown hotel. When it came time to leave, our guide instructed us to check out before dawn, when traffic was relatively light. She accompanied us to the airport, something also included in the package.

We bought our Bangkok package through an airline. Tour operators sell city packages, too.

A reader who visited Europe last summer with his wife recently wrote me about his experience with a package.

His travel agent had first come up with a cost of $3,200 for hotels in London and Paris and rail transportation between them. Then the agent found a Globus package that provided hotel, rail city tours, breakasts and transfers for the same price.

The reader estimates the package saved them more than $650. Another benefit was they didn't have to worry about their luggage; they tagged it in London, left it for Globus, and it reappeared in Paris.

A Paris-London package might be just the ticket for another reader who told me he plans to take his wife and four offspring -- ages 10 to 19 -- to Europe for three weeks in July. He's thinking of starting in Italy, moving on to Paris and spending rest of the time in the U.K., including Scotland.

Herding four youngsters around Europe during the busiest tourism period is ambitious, to say the least. Here's what I suggested:

-- Have a travel agent book the flights and at least one escorted tour, and reserve accommodations in Paris and train travel between major cities.

-- Start with a one-week escorted coach tour hitting Italy's Big Three -- Rome, Florence and Venice.

-- Consider renting two apartments in the same building in Paris. (Most European hotel rooms are small by our standards).

-- Spend several nights in London and do day trips to such sites as Stonehenge, Dover Castle, Canterbury Cathedral, or have the agent book a one-week tour into Scotland.

One piece of advice I gave applies to anyone planning a multi-country trip: When planning your itinerary, take into account the amount of time lost flying overseas and back, and getting from one country to another. I allow a day each way for the flights and a day for each time we'll be moving from one country to another.

Tracey McCormick of Ellison Travel and Tours in Exeter, who has led several group tours abroad, passed along some other good suggestions. Here they are, with my comments in brackets:

-- Read up on where you're going; the more you know the better you'll enjoy it. (You'd hate to discover after leaving Florence, for example, that it's home to one of the world's greatest sculptures, Michaelangelo's David).

-- Leave your North American expectations behind. (A coffee in a Paris cafe will cost considerably more than a double double at Tim's -- and won't taste the same.)

-- Learn a few words of the local language. ("Please,'' "thank you," plus a big smile, will get you a long way).

-- Don't live your trip through your camera; "experience the moment." (And give your thumbs a rest, too. Wonders such as the Taj Mahal are for savouring, not texting or tweeting).

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