How to Plan a Trip
Planning and booking a holiday can seem like a daunting task to a lot of people and worrying about not being organised can make the planning stage frustrating. This post aims to detail the way in which we plan our trips, hoping our readers can take something away from this process. Please note that this process may not work for everyone, but feel free to get in contact with us regarding any ways in which you would do it differently and why- we love to hear everyone’s way of planning!
Our First Steps:
Our first real step may seem simple and uninspiring, but we find it the easiest way to choose a location. Quite often a friend or family member will recommend a location to us, or perhaps we will come across a location whilst browsing social media or even read an article recommending it as a place to visit. We then start to investigate the specifics of this location, and for this we use a planning document- feel free to subscribe to our blog, we send our new followers a copy of this document! Having a document like this, really helps us in the future if we choose to visit somewhere we already have the details for.
Our document contains a section where we take down basic details of places we are planning on visiting; we will then have a more in-depth section for each location we are serious about visiting. The basic detail page is a way of mind-mapping multiple places we wish to travel to.
The document looks like this:
As stated, the first section very rough section, with estimated costs, just so we can get an idea as to whether it is in our budget/time frame. This can then help us onto the next stage, which is when we will go into a lot more detail. But first… we must ask ourselves some important questions:
1.Is it in a country we have already visited? We’re currently trying to visit as many different countries as possible- eventually we will go back to places we have already visited, but we are currently looking for variety. This may differ from person to person.
2.What duration of trip are we looking for? This is the reason why we have the all-important flight duration section within our initial table. If it is a 7hr+ flight, we want to spend more than a week there so that we can make the most of the location and not take a huge chunk out of our holiday time in just travelling there. For us, this is all dependent on holiday days that we have at work, some of you might not have this restriction so can choose to go for as long as you want.
We have the following “rules” for flight durations: (1-2hrs flight time=4+ days stay|2-4hrs=6+ days stay, ideally a week or more |5-7hrs= 10+ days stay|7hrs+=12 days stay) we do this to make the holiday worth our holiday days from work, especially as we like to have at least 1 or 2 days either side of the holiday to prepare and recover!
3. How safe is it to travel there currently? We always look at the county’s official status on the .gov website to see if there is civil unrest, strict regimes or covid protocol to make sure we are planning on going to somewhere that is stable at the time of booking. We know from recent events that the world is never a stable place, and that unrest can unfold at any point before getting there or could happen whilst we’re there- but as this is unpredictable, we can at least do a small amount of research into the current situation.
4. Is it within our budget? This is the all-important question. Whilst we are trying to visit as many places as possible, we need to know what is achievable within our salaries and as this is an initial planning stage, we look at an estimated cost knowing that we will eventually add elements such as spending money etc and know the full amount before booking. Even if we decide somewhere seems out of our price range, we keep it on there so that in the future (when we’ve hopefully saved money) we can come back to it and still know plenty of details about it.
We always take care to add into our initial table, the date/month/year that we accessed the research information, due to price fluctuations.
The Next Step:
Now that we have the simple and boring preliminary stage out of the way, we can start to get into the specifics of the chosen location. This stage may still seem boring and mind-boggling to some, but we weirdly enjoy it! We now fill out another section onto our travel document, specific pages for the chosen location (See images above).We categorise this into accommodation, plane travel, getting to the airport (normally via train as we don’t drive) and additional costs.
Accommodation
In this section we compare different accommodations we have come across. These will vary on the travel location- they will mostly be apartments but can be villas/houses depending on the price and whether anyone else is travelling with us. This section is great for comparing the pros and cons of each place, making it easier to choose. TOP TIP: We include a link to each place, even if you have saved them in a list on your chosen booking website, this just makes it easy when you are looking at your travel plans in one place.
Plane travel
In this section we compare the prices, times, and features of the different airlines we can fly with. This is great for seeing which prices include seating and baggage, and of course prioritising what time we arrive to make sure we get the most amount of time there. We will plan the specifics of the return trip when booking as this is not usually something that affects this stage of planning- we will put a return into our price to give us an idea on the overall cost.
Train to the airport
In this section we are just looking at getting an estimated cost and times for our train journeys. This is something that we usually book closer to the holiday as train tickets tend to be available in abundance. You may want to adapt this area to contain information about car travel to the airport (duration, link to route, fuel cost) and information about hire cars when you get to your destination (company, details of car, price per day etc…).
Additional Costs
Other things that we might add into this section would include spending money- we would normally try and figure this out closer to the trip, we know how much money we are looking at for that particular month.
We then add up everything on our document, look at the final overall cost and try to figure out whether we can bring costs down in any areas. Once we’re happy with costs and all details, we start the exciting bit of booking!! We tend to start with flights as it is the largest cost as, the flights will always fluctuate in price which is something to keep in mind. We then quickly book the accommodation- a good bargain always sells out fast. Finally we book our transportation to the the airport and any additional costs that need to be paid before the holiday.
Our very last stage is writing a rough itinerary of areas we want to see, attractions we could go to- times, places and costs. We do not strictly follow an itinerary as we do not enjoy restrictions whilst travelling, but it is always handy to have some details of activities we can do, which we can book if we feel like it.
Thank you for reading this information post, feel free to contact us if you think of anything we’ve missed or have an queries.
As stated, this method of booking travel is not for everyone. However if you’re feeling overwhelmed by booking a holiday, and just need a way to compare different aspects, feel free to use this method. If you would like a copy of the full travel document, sign up to our newsletter:
