After years of travel, we have some tried and true methods for travel planning. Here’s a short guide to selecting a destination, devising a custom itinerary and booking a trip for the most unique, relaxed and trouble-free travel experience possible. I’ve included a free, printable international travel planner (it works for domestic travel too), with prompts and checklists that you can download at the end of this post.
Like most people, we have constraints, especially time and money. Affordable group tours are usually not an option. Additionally, we like to do some off-the-beaten-path kinda stuff that isn’t commonly included in mainstream itineraries. For a while we spent a lot of money on tailored tours, and sometimes we still do. For the most part, we’ve taken domestic and international travel planning into our own hands. That allows us to personalise itineraries according to our unique criteria. Here’s how you can do that too!
For more on how to plan a trip, see these posts:
How to Plan a Road Trip You’ll Love
6 Best Online Trip Planning Resources for Indendent Travellers
Designing Travel: Cultural Travel Planning Resources
Full Disclosure: I may earn compensation for my endorsement, recommendation, testimonial, and/or link to any products or services from this website. Your purchase helps to support Duende, and I only recommend products/services that I love!
1. Finding travel inspiration
First, decide on a destination. A high-priority selection from our ENORMOUS bucket list is generally the seed for each of our trips. Here’s a few more places to look for travel inspiration:
- The visual nature of Instagram and Pinterest make them fun platforms for seeking inspiration and researching destinations.
- Think about the movies you’ve watched or books you’ve read–was there some setting that captured your imagination?
- Do you have a specific interest that is cross-cultural? Are you a foodie? Do you love performing arts or sport? Developing a trip around one of your passions is a cool way to guarantee you a unqiue experience.
2. Geography and timing
If you’re dancing around multiple ideas, start to narrow it down by proximity and time. For example, seasonal experiences such as cherry blossoms in Japan or swimming with whale sharks in Mexico require certain timing.
Furthermore, maybe you have a home base that allows you to access certain destinations more easily. As expats, we try to use our home base to explore the surrounding region closest to us at any given time. For example, when we lived in Singapore, we explored a lot of Southeast Asia. Now we’re in the USA, we visit a lot of North and Central America. Focusing on destinations that are closest to home, saves time and money.
3. Decide on your must-see list
You desire to explore a particular destination is usually tied to one or more particular experiences you’d like to have in that location. This forms the basis of your absolute, non-negotiable, must-see list. For instance, we started with out with a single must-see: Monarch butterflies overwintering in Mexico.
4. Build out your itinerary
Once you have your absolute must-do item/s, research additional things to do and see around that destination. There are plenty of “top things to do in…” lists around the internet ready to be Googled (and on this blog), but don’t forget to dig a little deeper too. The most famous or Instagrammable places, are not necessarily the best places to visit.
Going back to the Monarch butterfly example, we found a bunch of other sights around the sanctuaries, or on the way there, that we wanted to see. Those included a beautiful ex-mining town known for producing glass Christmas baubles, and a as stunning botanical garden enclosed in stained glass murals. We then added these to our list.
5. Budgeting time and money
Next, look at what is achievable in your timeframe and budget. To determine this we find group tour itineraries online that cover the bulk of our “must-see” list at the level of comfort we like to travel. These group itineraries give us an indication of the time and money required we should be aiming at.
For instance, when planning a 10-day trip to Central America we might look at what G Adventures is offering on their 10-day “Comfort-style” group tours. Specifically we looked at cost per person and what they include in their itinerary, to determine what’s realistic within our timing and budget. We might even use their exact itinerary as a skeleton to start building our own. Piggy-backing off the tried and true work of professionals like this is a great travel planning hack that saves a tonne of time!!
6. How to proceed, the crossroads of travel planning
The next step is to decide whether you feel comfortable continuing to plan the trip for yourself, or whether you need the assistance of a travel agent or tour company. The determining factors for us have most commonly been language, infrastructure and safety.
As monolingual English speakers, we call in help for some non-English speaking destinations, particularly if local operators are hard to find and don’t have English-language websites (or websites at all). We also get help for destinations that present challenging political situations, security concerns or might offer experiences that cannot be simply booked online or over the phone etc. Examples of places where we have enlisted professional travel agents to assist us in our international travel planning include Cuba, Galapagos Islands and Myanmar.
From here you can choose one of three routes:
Complete DIY
This is a trip where you would book your own flights, accommodaiton, transfers, car rental and plan your own itinerary. On our trip to the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico we decided it was safe and navigable enough even on our limited Spanish to go it alone. We mapped it out, made the necessary bookings and away we went.
Partial DIY
On a Partial DIY trip, you would generally book your own flights and accommodation, then book day tours for certain activities that require transport or specialised guidance/equipment. We certainly didn’t set off hiking on glaciers or looking for grizzly bears in Alaska all on our own. For the rest of the trip you can explore freestyle based on research and the plethora of free self-guided walking tours available.
Expert Level
Sometimes you just don’t have time to plan an extended trip with complicated connections. In some destinations there isn’t much infrastructure or maybe safety concerns if you wander off-piste. In these cases, we research locally-based tour companies to collaborate with. We provide them with our must-see list, hotel standard preferences, timeframe and budget, so they can make informed decisions on our behalf. Our trip to the Colombia Coffee Region is a prime example.
This doesn’t mean you should be passive in the planning process. We still do our research so we can provide the agent with plenty of direction and feedback. Sometimes travel companies will put something on your itinerary just because they are working off a template they use for all their customers. You need to be able to advocate for the stuff you want and what you don’t. Though you should remain open to their suggestions and guidance–deep knowledge of a destination is part of why you are paying for the help.
NOTE: Generally we always book our own flights to and from our starting/ending point, no matter which of the above three travel planning methods we go with. You don’t want travel agent mark-ups eating into your budget and it’s so easy to book directly with most airlines online.
7. Selecting a tour operator or travel agent
If you choose to go with “Expert Level” you’ll need to hire an agent to help you through the rest of the international travel planning process. We rarely use the same travel service twice. This is because we select local operators who are specialists in their local destination. We prefer to support local businesses for several reasons:
- Firstly, their intimate knowledge of their homeland or region can really benefit us in finding unique experiences. For instance, in Hue, Vietnam our tour guide (booked by a local operator) arranged us a special meal in a Buddhist monastery because his sister was a nun there. This is the kind of cool experience you can have with a company that lives and breathes their home/your destination.
- Secondly, it is more likely our money will go back into the local economy, which is important to us as we endeavour to travel sustainably.
- Thirdly, we avoid large markups that foreign agents add to bookings.
8. Getting down to the nitty-gritty
At this point, start getting right down into the logistics of international travel planning. Research things like visas, airport transfers, security, currency and language. I’ve created a detailed international travel checklist of the things we research about our destination as part of our travel plan and why.
Knowing these logistical details pre-departure saves a lot of time and stress when we get to our destination. Though it may seem a little tiresome to do all this research, I’ve never regretted it. In fact, I’ve had moments during trips where I’ve thought “thank goodness we sorted this out beforehand because I’m too {insert discomfort here e.g. tired, hungry, unwell}” to be faffing about and figuring it out on the fly.
9. Be prepared to throw it all away
Be prepared to throw it all away. Ok, maybe not all of it – that’s a tad dramatic. But no matter how much you decide to plan ahead, remember to remain flexible. Uncontrollable factors like weather and public transport, change things on the go and you may need to adapt. Plus, you’ll discover new things along the way that you’ll really want to do/see/eat. So you need a little wiggle room in your itinerary.
For example, it’s common for us to divert from our itinerary just from sheer exhaustion. We plan to squeeze a lot into the little time we have in a destination, and sometimes it’s way too much. For example, on the second last night of our Jamaica road trip, we had planned to go out on a boat trip to experience bioluminescence, but we were much too tired. We had dinner and went to bed early instead, so we were fresh for the last day’s activities. Sometimes you have to prioritise, listen to your body and take a break so you can enjoy the rest of the trip.
I hope this insight into how we plan a trip is useful and you’re able to design a customised trip to suit your desires, with minimal hiccups and maximum fun. If you have any questions, please feel free to drop them in the comments below.
Peace, love & inspiring travel,
Madam ZoZo
Pin for later
