My fiance and I are preparing to book parts of our honeymoon, which we will likely take next year after his graduation. I have found that booking trips is something that I find highly enjoyable. While studying abroad, I booked most of my trips and have learned a thing or two while doing so. Here are five tips to booking your next trip and feeling good about it.
1. Transportation before anything else.
The first thing I like to book is my flights. For our honeymoon, we’re going to England and the Netherlands, so the first things we will be booking are our flight from Minneapolis to London, London to Amsterdam and Amsterdam to Minneapolis. Your flights don’t have to be booked all in one sitting, depending on funds available. I like to book my flights through Kayak.com because it compares several airlines so that I can get the best deal and find a time that works for me.
2. Decide on your general route.
If you’re planning to change locations throughout your trip, as my fiance and I are planning to do, you’ll need to figure out where it would be best to “set up camp,” so to speak, and in what order. It doesn’t make geographic sense if you’re planning to visit England to fly into London, take the train to Liverpool, go visit Wales for a few days, and then go see Stonehenge and come back to London. Those places are too far away, taking away from your time visiting actual places, increasing your train time. Then there’s the cost factor. You’ll pay a lot more money by going long distances, so go to places that are near each other, working your way in
one direction. This is an important step because it’ll help you decide when you want to see certain things, and it’ll help you figure out your dates so that you can book your living space.
3. Living spaces come next.
After we know that we’re actually going to be going somewhere and have the tickets booked, we will look for places to stay. This is an important piece to
traveling-- you don’t want to
sleep out on the street now, do you? We will be booking a combination of hostels and Airbnb homes, depending on where we are and the cost to stay in each of these kinds of places. Know roughly what you want to get out of your experience in wherever you’re staying. When I went to London for the first time, I stayed in a hostel in East Ham because a) that’s what I could afford and b) I really just wanted a bed to sleep in, prioritizing exploring the city. So a hostel was a good option for me.
4. Book some of your activities, but not all of them.
You do not have to book every single thing you’re going to do and have your trip 100% planned out. In fact, I don’t recommend that you do that. I would recommend that you book the most expensive activities of your trip and the most time-intensive activities. For my trip to London, that meant booking a ticket to go and see the matinee show of "Les Miserables" in London’s West End. When I traveled to Italy, that meant booking a full-day tour to go and see the ancient city of Pompeii. Everything else that I did was impromptu, and I could decide once I got there and had a map of the area where I could see which things were close to each other.
5. Use the tools available to you.
One really neat thing that I found in my brief travels to
Germany was the
TripAdvisor App for smartphones. You can see locations that are off the beaten path. Like the TripAdvisor you can visit in your web browser, you can also look at self-guided tour routes that TripAdvisor users have created and shared. In Berlin, I found a self-guided tour that showed us World War II locations. On top of showing you which locations are where, there are some users that have included descriptions of each place you would visit. It’s a nice way to see parts of places that you might not normally choose to see on your own and learn more about the place you’re exploring along the way.
Best of luck as you plan your next trip! Happy travels!
