Tips for Travel: Pre-Planning

I’m a bit of a planner and love organizing.  I used to love planning our trips, booking the airfare, finding hotels and exploring all the things we could do in each city.  I quickly discovered that I needed a way to organize all the information for our trips so we could use it and my time wasn’t wasted.

Over a few trips I developed a way to document everything so we would have it all accessible and usable at all times.  I compiled all the information into a word document which we then kept in a large plastic envelope while on the trip.  As we visited places, we added the maps, guides and tickets to the envelope so everything was kept together and nothing got lost.

I set up the document with the information we needed first at the top like flight (including confirmation number, flight number, departure and arrival times), car rental (including confirmation number, rate and car type) and hotel information (including address, phone number, confirmation number, rate, check in/out times and directions if taking public transport).  Originally I did my documents in a standard format, but I quickly learned I could fit much more to each page, both saving paper and making it more convenient to view things on the run if I formatted it into two columns.

After the hotel and flight information, I added what there was to do in each city we were visiting.  I included the address, phone number (if available), opening hours, admission fees and sometimes directions or public transport lines.  I also made a spreadsheet for our days showing which attractions were open which days and what the hours were so when planning our days we could quickly see what the options were.

The first few trips, I also looked up recommended restaurants and added those to the documents as well but because we were usually on foot and exhausted by the end of the day, we never made it to any of the places so I stopped adding that information.  We have had very few terrible meals when just wandering in off the street into a place so just stuck with our meal choosing method of random selection!

I also usually tried to look up the weather not only to pack accordingly but also to keep in mind when planning our daily activities and what to wear and bring along each day.  I didn’t always put the weather on my document, but when I did I used many different systems.

And being the neurotic organizer and saver that I am, I also kept track of all our expenses.  My goal was to stay under €100 per day for all food and attractions and usually we were able to stay under €200-250 per day overall including airfare and hotel (depending on the place we were and hotel rates).