Travel planning made easy with these 5 simple steps

Often than not, most of us enjoyed the traveling experience itself and lesser on the planning.

Much lesser sometimes.

I, however, thoroughly enjoyed it actually. It’s fun, really! But you have to follow certain steps and rules of approach to make it easy. And that’s what I’m sharing in this article.

Traveling is exciting and it usually starts off with great enthusiasm to pick up activities and places to visit.

Most of us tend to research online to find great spots to go and what to avoid.

But we always get ahead of ourselves. We would end up with a long list of places that’s just impossible to plan a route.

So how do I go about doing it? There’s no point in suggesting to you on picking the best few out of the list.

Because how do you go about doing it? Where do you start? So here’s how I do it.

Step 1: Pinning all places of interest on Google Maps

It sounds obvious doesn’t it? But trust me, it isn’t. You would look up the location in Google Map itself, but you wouldn’t plot all of them at one go.

In fact, Google map doesn’t allow that unless you do a routing with a starting point.

I use Google Map’s handy Map tool to create a complete new Map to plot them.

Check out: Google Map’s Mapping tool

Now things get real. Quickly. You realise this list of yours isn’t always that practical with all the popular locations scattered across the map.

Suggestion: You should identify the nearest town of those activities and plot that down instead.

Step 2: Cleaning up and removing pins that are just impractical for you

At this point your map might look messy. It’s hard to decide and difficult to see what really works.

Start off by removing pins that are just way off your clusters of interest. Because you know it’s just not practical at all to try to cover that location.

Once you clean up your map, zoom in to your cluster of pins and see what works.

What should be obvious to you are locations that are difficult to access, such as on an island, in the middle of nowhere or no main highway connection.

I’m not suggesting to remove them. That defeats the purpose and kills the adventure.

I’m saying that time is limited and you can’t fit all of these “harder to access” locations. You will have to pick the best few.

Suggestion: It might also be the case where this particular faraway location is the highlight of the trip. In that case, your best course of action is to immediately plot your route to this place first. Below step 3 helps you stay on course.

Step 3: Identify the best and most logical route

In most cases, we get ahead of ourselves and over ambitious here.

We wanted to cover all. I get that.

But unless we have unlimited time and money, that just seems impractical too.

So to maximise the efficiency of your trip, you need an optimised travel route.

Where’s your starting point? Where do you go to next? Saving time on traveling back and forth, is going to help you big time.

And personally, the optimised route simply means that the end point should be a place that’s easy for me to return or transit back to where I’m taking my flight back home. And that the distance between one location to another, is not horribly long.

My experience: Back in New Zealand, I rented from a smaller local company and they only had 2 locations. And both are in Christchurch. So my route would then be a loop back at starting point.

Or best yet, circling back to the starting point. The time saved there, would mean covering one extra place.

I generally have no issue in most cases, but if you’re self-driving it can be tricky at times due to limited returning locations.

Suggestion: You will have to pick a convenient point from all the pins you have now. Keep in mind of the available locations for returning your rented car and the opening hours. And if you’re doing so, just make sure you have a way to get back home ya!

Step 4: Selecting Activities That Fit The Itinerary

Unfortunately, at this point some of you might go “argh, but I don’t want to be restricted to what I want to do!”.

If travel planning hasn’t been going too well for you and you don’t quite enjoy it, then it’s time to change that mindset a little.

You still have a ton of controls over what you want to do, but you need to insert a “guiding line” here – which is your route.

If you had managed to perform step 3 and had a general route with the end point you know you have to connect with, then it might just be easier for you do this.

Pretty much every activities hitting along that line, you can include them.

You would only need to worry about resting in between. You could also choose to add another stop point, if that makes sense to you.

A little detour doesn’t hurt much too, if it’s some place you really want to visit or do.

Step 5: Add the (almost) final itinerary all into the App “TripIt”! I highly recommend this

No, it’s not a sponsored article. And I’m not paid to say this or recommend them.

I used it before on my trips and I genuinely find it helpful. So I thought it would be good to share what I find is helpful with the community!

Adding your entire itinerary on this app is easy and it helps to map out how your trip looks like in the final state.

With direct integration with your calendar, flights and hotel booking apps, TripIt provides a seamless synergy of all things travel related into one single powerful app.

Perhaps you might ask, there are so many other similar apps out there that does the same or better, why do you recommend this though?

Well, simply because I’ve tested this. If you would like me to test some other apps and provide an opinion of it, leave a comment down below and I’ll gladly try it out!

One other powerful feature of the app is collaborating with others whom you’re traveling with.

Simply share your itinerary with them and they will receive all updates and notifications of their travel!

Other considerations and steps you might be taking

Naturally, travel planning doesn’t just end there. In fact, the itinerary is just the beginning.

There are other steps such as gears and necessities, budget and costs, and perhaps even a stage where you had to readjust your itinerary because of all the above.

While I won’t be covering all of them here, I thought some would be useful for you too.

If selecting activities had been gruelling for you, consider my 3 steps approach as a start.

I would suggest to create a list of activities you want to do and trim it down, with this 3-step rule:
1. location of activity
2. Cost of activity
3. Route

It sounds obvious but trust me when I say most of us don’t really bother. Because we get so hyped up seeing different activities, get all excited to want to do all of them.

So by knowing where the activity takes place would be the obvious rule in our activity selection phase.

Activity within 3-5km diameter is usually a good gauge for me.

Yours might be larger or smaller depending on your comfort level and transport mode.

But having a distance range would allow me to know if I could get to one place and be back fast enough without losing too much time.

Tip: Even if you’re driving, don’t assume you can get to one place faster. In general, the distance apart overseas is much larger and can range from 1 to 5 hours driving duration!

Another consideration is activity prices. Personally, there’re always two major points that makes decision harder.

Much harder, at times.

Competition causes all tour agencies to provide almost a similar package at a slightly varied price.

That’s not the bad thing. The bad thing is, how are you going to decide which is better or how different is it?

RELATED

Expedition Happiness is a Netflix documentary film of a couple who decided to drop everything back home to go for an epic adventure on a road trip.

A part of the decision-making process boils down to your preferences and research. But I do have a generic “guiding” line on picking out what works for me.

And in my opinion, having more than 2 activities in a single package is not always recommended.

Hear me out.

Most of the running tours will average 5 to 8 hours max and having 2 activities already meant that there is only 4 hours max for each.

That may seem like a lot, but most of the time tours include traveling time, both to and fro, into the package total duration.

So that means effectively, you only have maybe a maximum of 2 hours per activity in a 2-activity package.

Likewise, 1 activity for 8 hours may seem overkill too (though usually those are like hiking, cruising, etc).

That is just my thought anyway. It is entirely up to you if you think those deliver the best cost effectiveness and experience.

Check out more on Trips and Reviews…