10 Tips To Plan The Perfect Trip
11 Minute Read | Written by Erin Roche
So you’ve got loads of leave saved up after not taking any well deserved holidays throughout the pandemic saga, and it's finally time to organise your dream getaway. But where do you start!?
In this guide, we’ll share the tips and tricks we use to plan incredible, memorable, and Instagrammable trips, having travelled to Asia, Europe and around Australia together pre and post pandemic.
Whether you’re planning a one week beach escape or a six month backpacking adventure, the bones of planning a trip remain fairly similar. On our travels, we have experienced so many incredible sights by doing just a little bit of extra research, but have also been suckered in by the amazing Instagram posts that don’t quite fit reality.
By putting in the steps we’ve included below, we think you’ll be able to create a dream itinerary that suits your needs and makes for an incredible trip! And we’ll breakdown trip planning into manageable steps to make what can be an overwhelming task, an absolute breeze.
Pick the time of year to travel
The first, and most important step, is working out when you are going to travel. Planning your dream Icelandic road trip, and realising your boss approved only five days in the dead of winter… you might have some problems.
First things first, work out when you can actually go on your holiday. This may be dependent on your job, school holidays, or because you want a warm summer vacation, but whenever you pick is going to decide the best places you should travel to.
If you’re from Australia, a good time of year to avoid travelling interstate is school holidays as prices inflate and everything is packed out. For Australians travelling overseas, December school holidays can be a great time to travel as European and American students are in school apart from the few weeks over the festive holiday period. Or perhaps you’ve been dreaming of a European summer? It’s the dream to live out a Euro summer in your bikini, sipping on never ending Aperols delivered directly to your coconut oiled hand - but it’s a dream that you and millions of others wish to live. If you don’t like the idea of being shoulder to shoulder with every other tourist visiting the Mediterranean, then a June/July trip may not be for you.
Once you’ve worked out the rough time of year you’ll travel, it’s time to move to the next step!
How long do you have to travel?
Another important question to ask before you decide on your location - how long are you able to travel for? If you’re in Australia and only have fourteen days, it may not be realistic to make it to Europe, managing a severe case of jet lag on departure and return (not fun), so maybe the Pacific Islands are calling your name instead?
Make sure when you consider the length of your journey, you take into account the travel time, including check in and customs at the airports if travelling via plane and any time zone changes - will you gain or lose any time on your way to and from your destination?
By considering these things, you may be able to more clearly see exactly how much time you have on your trip to pack with destinations and activities, instead of being disappointed when you run out of time.
Consider your budget
Before you can work out exactly how much your trip is going to cost and where you want to go, we would recommend setting yourself a budget. It is super frustrating having your heart set on an over water bungalow experience in Bora Bora, only to work out that you can’t afford the $7000.
When considering your budget, you should think about when you plan on travelling - is it 12 months away, or next month? This allows you to consider how much discretionary money you have to spend on your travels or how much you can reasonably save over the period leading up to your departure.
If you intend on travelling for a single month in a years time and want the trip to be on the cheaper side of the things without full-on backpacking, you may estimate spending about $100 AUD a day. For a trip like this, you need to save about $8 a day which for most people, is totally reasonable (hint: skip that daily coffee on the way to work). If this sounds doable for you, you might be setting a budget of about $3000 which will let you more easily pick realistic activities and accommodation for you.
This is not the same as calculating the cost of your trip - this is just setting a guide so that we can move ahead and plan the trip without having to ask the parents for a loan down the track (of which we’re guilty of, thanks to emergency pandemic flights). As part of this step, you should also consider some additional costs like travel insurance and an emergency fund - two things you shouldn’t ever be without.
Pick where you’ll travel to
The hardest part without a doubt, where will you go?! Are you keen to finally board a plane that crosses continents? Or are you wanting to explore more of your own country?
Thanks to almost two years trapped in Australia, we were forced to get out and explore our backyard and were absolutely blown away by the things we saw that were as close as an hours plane trip away. But we’ll also never say no to new adventures in countries we’ve never been or want to see more of.
The key here is to be realistic. You’ve picked the time of year, how long you have and set yourself a budget, it’s time to narrow down your possible locations. Chances are, after two years of minimal travel, you’ll have accumulated quite the bucket list - so take out your list, think about the time you’ve got and how long you want to adventure there for, and let’s see what works.
We usually put together a list of places that we want to go, with a lot of these being single day visits in a general region. We actually love being able to find hidden gems and then finding other cool places nearby that we can add together to make a trip. We loooveee scrolling through Instagram and Pinterest to find insane & photo worthy locations, and find this a great way to discover something interesting! However this might not work for you, some people are more old school and find the Lonely Planet guide books to be the go-to, or perhaps a ‘Top 100 Places To Visit Before You Die' guide!
Another awesome tool that you can use is Skyscanner’s ‘Everywhere’ feature if you have no idea where to go, it’s an awesome way to find the cheapest places to travel if you’re on a budget like we always are!
When researching where you are going to go, be sure to check visa requirements on the countries official entry website! Depending where you are travelling to and for what length of time, you may need to purchase a visa before arriving in the country. It’s also important to consider what inbound entry requirements the country has as a result of the pandemic. Do you need to be vaccinated, or need a test prior to arrival? What are the quarantine requirements where you are travelling to?
Once you’ve picked your location, you can get down to the fun stuff - picking the beautiful sights or exciting activities that you are gonna see or do!
How to figure out how much time to spend in each place
Before we actually book our flights and accommodation, we like to plan out a rough itinerary so we know which regions we will be in at certain times during our trip! Doing this first will let you select the best terminal (whether that’s flight, bus or train) to arrive into and what accommodation is going to work best, maybe basing yourself in one area, or hopping from accommodation to accommodation every few days. And this step is our favourite part!!
As we’ve said, we love finding amazing hidden places that are off the beaten track but it is also good to visit the places that do attract tourists daily - they are often popular for good reason! By working out exactly what you want to see while you’re there, you can work out how much time you’re going to need. But please don’t plan your holiday down to the millisecond - although it is heaps of fun looking forward to finally being able to see fantastic spots in person rather than in an edited post on Instagram, it can sometimes be even better to stumble across a hidden gem whilst on the road!! So even though this blog post is about how to plan a trip, make sure you don’t over plan it - you don’t want to miss something amazing that you didn’t know about just to get to the next planned spot on time - but more about this later!!
So how exactly do we find the places we want to visit on our trip? We comb through blog posts, YouTube vlogs, Pinterest and Instagram trying to find gems, and are usually pretty successful! Talking to other travellers is another way to find cool places, especially locals. Make sure you write these down in a book (we are big list people) or pin them on your Google Maps. You might even look at saving posts on Instagram to a separate folder so you can group them altogether for one trip. You can do this by clicking the ‘bookmark’ icon under a post, selecting ‘Save to Collection’ and add a new collection such as ‘NYC TRIP’.
One little tip we would give you is check the availability or opening times of any activities or places you want to visit before you move on to the next steps. Certain activities like museums may close on certain days, markets may only run the first Sunday of the month and some boat tours may only run Tuesdays and Thursdays! If your trip is only for a week, the availability of certain activities may influence the exact days you travel.
Once we’ve gathered a list of activities and sights to see, we like to sit down with pen and paper (old school style) and draft an itinerary so we can realistically see the time we need. This doesn’t need to be the final itinerary at all, but it just helps us take a step back and look at the reality of fitting everything in. What we find is most helpful for us is grouping together sights into one portion of the trip and seeing how long these portions would take separately. For example, on our North Queensland trip, we looked at North of Cairns, Daintree / Cape Tribulation, Atherton Tablelands and South of Cairns as our individual sections.
HELPFUL TIP: Print off a Google Maps screenshot of the area and mark the sights you want to see with a x, then you can see the simplest route to get from point to point and which sights you could group together in a day.
Big Google Maps fans here, we also use the app to check how long it will take to get from place to place, taking into consideration public transport or driving times, and work out how much can be accomplished in one day. By repeating this over and over again for all the places you absolutely don’t want to miss, it will give you a more realistic idea of how much you can fit it, and remember, leave some extra time here and there for the amazing finds along the way.
One thing we see people often forget to consider is check in and check out times, grocery shopping, traffic etc. These can take big chunks out of your days and may really influence how much time you can realistically spend in each place.
Book flights (or other method of travel)
Now that we’ve really narrowed the location down, and established exactly how long we will need, it’s time to start booking your adventure. First things first, how to get there. Are you getting a plane, bus or train to your destination? Or are you driving yourself?
There are heaps of great sites to find transport options for you! We personally love Skyscanner for our flights, Omio for booking on the ground transport, and Moovit for public transport but we’ve listed some other awesome options below as well:
Momondo - search and compare flights
Kiwi - search and compare flights
Rome2Rio - multi modal routes from ‘a’ to ‘b’
Flixbus - bus travel through Europe
It’s also a good idea to consider your luggage and packing style at this stage. It’s all well and good to book a super cheap flight on Skyscanner thinking you’ve got yourself a bargain, only to find out later that it doesn’t include checked baggage and you (like Erin) are not a minimalistic packer. Make sure you read the baggage fine print as well as the cancellation policy to know where you stand if anything goes wrong. Sometimes a budget flight ends up being more expensive than booking through a non budget airline, so keep this in mind.
Some money saving tips when booking flights:
Most budget airlines make you pay to choose your seat, so if you’re flying budget we’d recommend ditching your travel buddy for the two hour flight and sitting separate instead of dishing out the cash. There’s a chance one of you will have a spare seat next to you and you can just move!
A flight with a stopover may be marginally cheaper, but if you’re anything like us, you’ll end up spending the money you saved on snacks at the stopover airport anyway, so we prefer to just find direct flights.
Sometimes flights to regional airports may be cheaper instead of flying directly into the city, but often the shuttle bus or train to get to the city from the regional airport is more expensive, so do some research in each destination before you opt for the airport you’ve never heard of.
If you’re only going for a short trip, pack carry on if you’re trying to fly budget. When budget airlines have sales, you can pay as little as £5 on a flight from country to country in Europe, but you’ll quickly add on another £50 in baggage.
Bonus: You should also check if ride sharing is legal and commonly used in the country you’re travelling to, or if bartering is culturally accepted. If bartering and taxi use is common, in places like Morocco for example, we’d recommend doing some research on how much trips from places like airports and train stations to key tourist sights will cost you - it’ll help you to know how much you should pay before 8 different taxi drivers begin offering you rides and loading your bags.
Consider travel insurance
With your transport now booked, you’ve officially got something to lose if anything goes wrong, so we would recommend you now consider getting travel insurance!
Travel insurance, an overwhelming and confusing task to say the least! We really don’t know why it has to be so complex to get yourself decent travel insurance, what we do know however is how potentially screwed we could be without it.
So, to check out different travel providers, you can hop on a site like Compare the Market (yes that adorable Meerkat company) and get a basic overview of what’s on offer for your travel plans. We recommend you seek a policy with solid medical coverage, cancellation coverage, pandemic coverage (yep it’s a thing now), and any specifics that you may need if you’re participating in certain activities like skiing/riding scooters/diving.
One issue we encountered when seeking out travel insurance was finding a provider that would cover us when purchased from/travelling from outside our home country. For us as Australians travelling to Indonesia from the UK, we couldn’t find any Australian companies willing to cover us (this was also largely impacted by the border restrictions at the time). We ended up finding Safety Wing, which is a company marketed at digital nomads. We haven’t had to make any claims at this time so we can’t recommend them wholeheartedly, but so far, our experience and their communication has been seamless. If you are a digital nomad as well, you may want to look into coverage for your tech equipment, as this is probably one of your biggest assets and worth protecting.
The real key to travel insurance is to read the PDS (Product Disclosure Statement), before you spend any money on insurance. This is an absolute must do, you’ll be super frustrated if you fork out big bucks on travel insurance, only to be told you have to pay the damage costs when you wreck the hotels jet ski because it wasn’t covered by insurance.
Book accomodation
Accommodation is the expense that will vary most from traveller to traveller. Some may prefer a 5 star hotel with valet, whilst others are going to enjoy a rural farm stay experience.
Earlier on in the planning process, we set a rough budget for the trip, here’s where this really starts to matter. If you’ve set a budget of $100 per day, you’re a big foodie, and want to do lots of paid activities in each place you visit, you may need to look at minimising your accommodation costs to stretch money elsewhere. For people like this, we’d recommend sites like HostelWorld or even Couchsurfing (be sure to do your research and put in place safety measures). HostelWorld is our go to site whenever we find a new place to travel to - you can filter by cost, distance to city centre, rooms with ensuites and ratings - to find what works best for you. There are lots of hostels with ‘girls only’ dorms and private rooms, which are great if you want budget but are a bit concerned for safety or just simply don’t want to share a room with others.
If you’ve got a bit more leeway in your budget to consider nicer accommodation, we would check out booking.com and Airbnb. Airbnb can offer some really local experiences and allow you to mingle if you select a share style accommodation. booking.com can help showcase all the accommodation options within a certain area without having to do much work. If you find a hotel you like, we recommend seeing if they have their own website and comparing the price before you do any booking - some may even price match!
Working out your itinerary
You’ve got your transport sorted and worked out where you’ll rest your head on your trip, now it’s time to nail down your itinerary.
If you are more the work-it-out-as-you-go type, fantastic, you’re almost fully planned. We too enjoy a spontaneous trip, but we waste a lot of time when we’ve got no idea where to go, so we’d recommend having a few key things you’d like to visit to guide your time.
As we said earlier, our favourite way to plan is to mark out certain areas and find the sights we’d love to see within them. As photographers and content creators, a big part of our planning is considering sunrise and sunset times, and which places we would like to visit at what time of day. Even if you’re not a photographer, our biggest travel tip is waking up early to beat the crowds, so this point isn’t completely void just because you’re not a creator. We often pick the busiest sights to see first so we aren’t trying to squeeze between people or fight traffic jams all day long.
Again, as we already mentioned, make sure you pay attention to opening days, market days etc to make sure you don’t miss out on something you have planned.
We’ll have another blog post coming on how to find places to take photos, so keep your eye out for that if you’d like some insider tips!
Pack and let the excitement take hold
The finally step will likely come in the panicked hours before your flight if you’re like most people, or perhaps you’ve got a written list three weeks in advance of exactly what you’re taking. Regardless, make sure you pack to the specifications of your baggage allowance, and be sensible with what you pack for each destination. If you’re travelling to many Asian countries and intend on visiting temples, this will often involve packing a long skirt or sarong, as well as a long shirt or throw over, not just to be respectful to the cultures, but often because it is mandatory. You can check local tourism boards or tourist websites for recommended things to be bring, and also skim packing lists for recommendations.
Depending on where you travel, you may want to research certain vaccinations, and if you’re travelling with any medication (like Erin with an epipen) you should get a doctors note in case airport security/customs have any issues.
If you’re struggling with what to pack, remember that most places you travel to will sell all the essentials that you’ll need! This was one of our biggest realisations when we first travelled overseas to start our long term travel journey. We stressed over leaving things behind, but everything can be replaced, and another insider tip, we often found better stuff overseas! We will be posting some packing list recommendations on our blog shortly so you can check those out soon!
And that wraps up your travel prep! It’s time to go! We hope these ten steps have helped your process of planning the perfect trip.
That's it!
If you’ve made it down here, thank you so much for reading!
We’ve shared absolutely everything about what we spent during our trip to Iceland to help you plan your very own adventure to that unbelievable place, if you have any questions or have had your own experience in Iceland, let us know below!