Emman 
Having a well-thought travel plan can make or break your awaited trip. A careful plan will save you time, money and effort. This blog will help you gain traction on your travel plans.
Confused?
You don’t know how to plan your travels?
Stressed out?
Got stuck in the dark wishing you know what to do next?
Did you end up staring at the ceiling, trying to pick up the ideas together to make your travel successful?
Oh! the joys of traveling…
… and it’s sorrows too.
In the words of Denzel Washington. “If you pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud, too.”
An enjoyable trip will be as successful as how you planned it.
Mostly, travel aspirants get so excited that they get ahead of themselves and end up turning on blind spots, unprepared. They don’t know where to start, or they get overwhelmed by the information around them.
That’s why, in this blog, we’ll shred the essentials for planning your next trip piece by piece. We’ll take the elephant one bite at a time.
We’ll discuss each of the factors needed to make your travel easy breezy. You can download (no emails asked) the travel planning brief found at the end of this blog as you follow through.
No Promises, but You Will Improve
You will make mistakes.
Accept and be prepared for it.
A veteran traveler still screws up. There are many variables that are involved that we can’t control or handle. Examples are adverse weather, canceled flights, missing luggage, political unrest, and acts made by God.
There’s no promise of a perfect travel here, just a better one.
The idea is to help your bulb light up that there might be some things that you have not put up front.
This blog can promise you that you’ll be one up better on your travel planning than before. This will help you start on the right foot.
A baby learns to walk one step at a time, and so will you on your travel plans.
Table of Contents
First Step: Let’s Start With a Travel Brief
You’d like to start your travel plans with this brief:
It looks like nothing much, but it is powerful that we can limit ourselves from the deluge of options in terms of destination, activities and budget. This brief narrows down your options and gets mentally behind your travel plans.
For example, I a travel brief would be something like this:
I want to go to Thailand on March and do city tour, beach outing and night party for 2 weeks with a budget of USD$3000.
The factors depend on each other. Without the one, you’ll leave a hole that will sink your plans.
Imagine we have a million spots on our planet to choose from for our destination, and activities will range from hiking to diving and a budget of $1,000 – $10,000, depending on your travel style.
By doing this, we have able to wrap our heads around our travel goals and start moving forward with our plans.
This is also where we can figure out your flexibility. You might be open to changing destinations, but the dates are non-negotiable. You can also increase travel budget, but never the destination of your choice. Everything’s up to you.
Now, let’s talk one by one about the things that we need to cover for our travel plans.
Destination: The Direction You Want to Go
Want to go somewhere but not exactly sure where?
We need to unravel your desired destination. Having a travel destination in mind is the direction of your travel plans.
Imagine an airplane wandering aimlessly in the skies or a boat without a heading. Can they reach somewhere?
Obviously, no.
Picking a destination is the hardest “where” that you’ll have to answer. Again, with staggering options to choose from, picking a destination can be tricky and astounding. But once you know where you want to go, other factors will fall in line.
You might have already chosen a place right before you find this blog. You already have a natural leaning of a place you’re dreaming of going.
While some people will have yet to decide where they’ll spend their holiday. No particular place; just somewhere that you can defuse yourself from your toxic boss or stressful job.
Some recommended sites can help you decide where to go.
Choosing the destination can be from a recommendation from someone who has been there- a friend, family or workmates, and they bring you lovely stories from afar. This place has wonderful people, interesting culture and vibrant cities. Somewhere that persuades you to go.
Other times, you might be interested in somewhere you’ve seen on Facebook or Pinterest. It could be the glaring orange sunset of Boracay or endearing landscapes of Nusa Penida, places that have captured your eyes and eventually your heart.
Again, travelers led them to go somewhere for a planned activity, a hobby that they have outside their boring work life. These travelers understand where they want to go.
For example, if you’re a mountaineer, naturally, you want to conquer Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro. Or if you’re an underwater lover, Koh Tao, Thailand might be an interesting place for you.
Date: When Do You Want to Go?
Dates that surround your travel are crucial to your travel plans.
Seasons and climates depend on your travel dates. And by season, I mean the low and high tourist season. Travel dates also dictate flight and hotel prices.
Most tourists flock to go to hotter places and chase summer, hence dictating the tourist season. A high tourist season is where a place receives the highest number of tourists and often hotel and flight prices are higher. It will be the opposite of the low tourist season.
The big factor why the tourist season changes is the weather. Some places might have what they call a “typhoon season”. As the name suggests, it’s not ideal to get a tan on the beach.
After you decide on where to go and your travel dates, research whether it’s a high or low season and check the weather if it’s compatible with the activities that you want to do.
It also manages your expectations about flight and accommodation prices. Following the law of supply and demand, high demand with low supply increases prices, and vice versa.
So, don’t go grumbling about why hotel prices in the Philippines are relatively higher than other destinations between April-June as it’s summer. To beat this, monitor promotions or try booking months earlier before your travel. You can also use credit card points or cash backs on booking apps.
Activities: What Do You Want to Do?
Knowing what you want to do will help shape your travel trips.
Others prefer to go over with the activity first. While others want to know what activities are available at their destination.
Some travelers don’t care about anything. They want to lazy-chill themselves on a beach, get a tan, and read a book. All they care about is to feel nature, drink cold beer and party at night.
Whichever you prefer, it’s important to know if you’re doing any activities, as it determines what stuff you’re going to bring and what’s the budget we’re looking at.
It will also help make sense of your itinerary and let you know if your chosen activities are doable or not. For example, you will list hiking and surfing as your activities. The travel time from one place of activity to another will take a 6-hour drive. Are you willing to take this? To spend 6 hours on your trip on the road to try both activities? It’s entirely up to you.
This also helps you make appropriate bookings prior to your activity. Early bookings can give you good deals, skip long queues and guaranteed reservations.
For an enjoyable travel experience, prioritize what you want to do and what’s fine by you if you skip an activity.
Duration: How Many Days/Weeks Are You Staying?
How long you stay will affect the budget you set for your trip.
This will also help you in making your itinerary and whether you can do or can’t do the activities you’re planning.
A trip duration can be a quick weekend getaway or one year depending on your time-freedom, or flexibility. Knowing how long you’ll stay will help you determine the right accommodations and activities for you.
Activities can adjust accordingly if you have enough space and time at your destination. You’re more flexible on longer stays than a week’s.
I’m not saying that you should go on a longer trip than a short one. Knowing your trip duration can help you arrange your activities accordingly and allocate a budget on each day or month of stay. This will also help you book the correct number of nights for your chosen accommodation.
Look, you don’t have to force yourself to have an exact number of days or months, for now. Saying “maybe a month” or “around 3 days” is enough to get a mental picture of how long you are planning to stay and plan your activities surrounding your trip duration.
Budget: How Much Are You Willing to Pay?
Your budget is the oxygen of your trip.
The ideal budget you must figure should cover the cost once you step out of the house until you come back. Simple questions like “how much should a taxi fare cost when I arrive?” can help you get started.
The money that you’ll put on your brief will provide the cost of flights, accommodation, activities, taxi fares and other miscellaneous things that you might think that’ll involve moolah.
Excellent research is the foundation of a precise budget. Try to turn all of the stones to learn about all of the fees and prices associated with your trip. If you plan to dine at a restaurant based on the reviews, check their prices to manage your expectations about how much a dinner will cost.
In this way, you won’t widen your eyes and be stuck in your throat as you look at an exorbitant bill.
Before you spend and release money for your trip, save the whole money first and then pay one by one the things you need to book in advance like, flights, hotels and activities that need down-payments.
As much as possible, try paying credit cards to earn points you can use on your future trips.
Research the average costs to tour around the place in a day. For instance, touring Paris can cost around USD $80 /day. You can use the ballpark figure to estimate how much you need to save for your trip.
Allow yourself some breathing space on your budget. Too tight will lead to shortfall and mismanaged expectations. Exceeding estimates is better.
Second step: Important things to consider on your travel plans
Now that we have covered our travel brief, let’s talk about the things behind the scenes that will help you gain clarity on what’s important for you. There are things not mentioned in the brief that come into play.
Negotiables and Non-negotiables
Your brief contains an interconnected variable that relies on one another.
To make a fix on this. Let us first identify ourselves as a traveler. Below are the type of travelers that you’ll fall into:
- Destination-first
- Activity-first
- Budget-first
- Date-first
As the name suggests, a traveler will put one factor as more important than the other. This will also be the first thing that you’ll fill in on your brief.
If you’re a destination-first traveler, you’ll write first where you want to go. They are flexible about how much to save up or activities that they’ll do.
Destination-first dreams to go to a place they’d be dying to go for, probably because of the vibe they’re feeling, a reference from a book that they’ve been reading or a catchy photo that persuades them to go to that place.
An activity-first traveler will write first the activities. For example, a SCUBA diver by hobby, on his holiday from work, will write first that he wants to dive and then scan his next dive spot. A traveler who’s obsessed with his favorite band will write “watch concert of band X” and then catch their next gig, no matter how much it costs, where or when their next play is.
Budget-first travelers will look for the cheapest flight and put the destination “everywhere”. He doesn’t care where the lowest price will take him or what’s waiting for him there. All he has is a budget that he needs to spend for his next holiday.
A date-first travelers are travelers where their antagonist boss has decided when they can have their holidays. These travelers have little time-freedom on their hands. They follow religiously the dates surrounding their trip. When these travelers have the chance to take a holiday, the only question left would be where and what to do.
Now that you know what to fill in first, head to your 2nd priority. Write the highest importance down to the 2nd and the lesser preference. Check the order of what’s important for you.
For example, when a date-first traveler plans, he wants to fill in the second most important for him, which, let’s say, the budget. From there, he will fill in the lesser important factors.
Research
Research helps you get a view of what’s on the horizon.
Knowing all the information you need before the trip improves anticipation and you become smarter in your choices. It also eases your anxiety.
Research also reduces thinking time about when, what, and where the practical option is. It pays to get deep into research. An hour of research is an hour freed up on your actual trip.
Don’t wander aimlessly about what to do next on your trip. You can program an optimal trip based on careful research. You can also weigh options on all the information you have gathered.
You can research a lot of factors involved in your trip like:
- Where you can get the cheapest flight
- Where best to stay- cheaper and near the activities you’re planning
- Mode of transport
- Things to do
- Restaurant options
- Weather
- Ideal budget for the entire trip based on your travel style
- Social norms and customs
- Transportation and activity fees
Flights
We could all agree that the cheaper the flights, the better.
The best search flight engine to do this is Google Flights. It aggregates the whole internet of all flights, from all kinds of airlines, and shows you the cheapest option you can have.
Once you find the cheapest flight on your chosen date, it’s recommended to end your research at the airline website and avoid, as much as possible, third party travel booking sites.
There are tons of tips around the internet on searching for the cheapest flight. One is, the best time to book is around two months before your travel; and weekdays have better price deals than weekends.
Try multiple flight searches because you might find a golden nugget of flash seat sales. When you’ve been able to redeem enormous miles and credit card points, it can also help you save a precious, hard-earned budget set for your trip.
Accommodations
The ideal accommodations are those near the places that you want to see.
It can also help if these accommodations are near the city center and nearby available public transport. Accommodations highly depend on your travel style. Are you a backpacker and don’t mind sleeping in hostels? Or do you prefer to stay in hotels?
Either/Or, it’s entirely up to you.
Don’t misunderstand that hostels are dirty and sketchy. There’s like that out there, but it circles back to your research skills. Check photos and reviews and see if it’s a good fit for your accommodation needs.
Some reliable accommodation websites to look for the right place to stay:
Site reliability would depend on your chosen destination and room preference. Also, try to be loyal to one site as frequent usage will give you some cash back programs, which you can use on your future travels.
As an example, this blog from trvlguides shows a comprehensive info about AgodaCash rewards.
Itinerary
Itinerary is the blueprint of your trip.
It’s where all your plans and research make sense. It’s basically a time by time, day by day of things to do, where to go and the route you’re taking. By doing this, you have created a program that you’ll (hopefully) follow to fulfill all your wants during your trip.
Now, like any other topics here, travel itinerary is a highly subjective matter. It’s entirely up to you if you want a spontaneous waltzing around the city or you want to follow a trip schedule.
For those who have an itinerary, consider the travel time to go from one place and the time you want to spend there. Estimate how long you do your activities.
You might think that making an itinerary is tedious. The structure of it should depend on how long you’re staying- is it 2 weeks? 2 months? 1 year? Shorter stays prefer a time by time itinerary.
Longer stays don’t need a day to day itinerary. Leave some days open on whatever you wish to do. It could be a “rest day”, meaning you just want to sleep in your hotel and not to think where to go next. Feed your curiosity to go to that interesting waterfall that some locals have recommended to you. Or, you might have been able to pass by a restaurant that looks inviting and you want to come back to check it out.
Weather
Weather forecast is one of the many travel blind spots.
The best time to check the weather is when you’re traveling.
Governments invest heavily on technologies to know what the weather’s going to be, to help you minimize risk and prepare your activities ahead.
It pays to research the general climate of the place during your travels; review everyday weather to see if your activities are doable or not. By doing this, you can cancel activities before you even step out of your hotel and think of something else.
Do you want to get caught in heavy rainfall during your hike? I don’t think so. You also don’t want to be in the middle of the sea during rough conditions if your trip involves a boat ride. Although sea and air transport cancels if they expect the weather to be unkind, attempt to check for yourself too.
Anticipating weather can help you rethink and plan again ahead of time before it’s too late to turn back. Weather checks can also help you prepare the right outfit to bring. You’re doing yourself a great favor when keeping yourself away from a catastrophic bad mood.
Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail
Traveling has, of what it’s like, countless things to consider. It’s quite overwhelming and some blind spots are up ahead; not to mention the things that’s out of our hands.
Narrowing the things to look at is gaining a clearer picture of what’s important for your travels. You’re now a more prepared traveler than you were before.
If you’re to miss some important points in this travel planning, chances are you’re going to waste your precious time, shell out more money and frustrate your expectations. That’s why, dedicate an amount of time to plan your travels and avoid this.
Look, I don’t mind if you’re a spontaneous traveler. If you arrive in Thailand with only your passport and some clothes, with no obvious intention of where to go and what to do, that’s fine with me. If your style is like that, you have your own reasons. The blog’s intention is how to make the most out of your trip- while saving time and money.
I’ll Make Things Easier for You
What we narrow down, we’ll make it narrower.
By downloading this travel plan, you’ll get a clearer picture of all the things we talk about in this blog. This template will guide you to decide your future travel plans. This will help you not to miss any details about your travel endeavors.
You’re now clear on your goals and more oriented about your travel planning.