Planning a Big Trip: How We Do it

 

We often start planning our trips with a visit to a bookstore to look at travel guides.
 Fodor's, Lonely Planet and Eyewitness Travel all have their strengths. 36 Hours
books by The New York Times can be fun to read and might alert you to a
destination you hadn't thought of. They might make you intent on trying a
particular restaurant or shopping a particular street, but more complete
 travel guides are much more useful and likely more up to date. 
(I worked at The Times on some of the original 36 Hours articles
and as a freelancer on some of the books.)
. 

       There is no way for me to tell you how to plan your own travels.  I can tell you how Jane and I plan ours. We're fortunate in being able to take long trips.  Our longest was three months in Italy in 2018.  

         Here's how we do it:

         First we select a primary destination.  For Italy it was Rome.  For the Balkans it was the islands of Croatia.  Then we try to figure out the best time of year to be there. This is especially important now that some months can be unbearably hot in parts of Europe, northern Africa, Australia, etc. Then we look to see what else in that part the world we might want to visit.  We reason that if we're flying eight or more hours to go somewhere, we should see enough to justify the inconvenience. The Croatian islands trip grew to include much of Greece, Montenegro, Slovenia and even Italy.  We usually buy a Fodor's or other travel guide and go online to research our tentative destinations. 

         With some idea of multiple places to visit, I usually work up an itinerary and figure out how we could get from one place to the next.  In Morocco, we relied on hotels to arrange a car and driver to take us to our next destination. In other places where we're more comfortable driving, we rent cars. In Greece we used ferries to get from one island to another.  We took a train from Zagreb, Croatia, to Ljubljana, Slovenia; a bus from Ljubljana to Piran, Slovenia; a taxi from Piran to Trieste, Italy; and a train from Trieste to Venice. 

         Then we deal with the single most expensive item of most trips: the long-haul flight from the U.S. to wherever we're going. We might use Expedia or something similar to find what airlines go where, but then we book directly with the airline or use our credit card's travel service. We think we will give up on the later since such "third-party" bookings can lead to problems when flights are delayed or changed. Chase Travel has been extremely difficult to work with.

        At this point, after we've decided how much time we think we want in each place, Jane starts looking at hotels, paying particular attention to reviews on sites like Tripadvisor.  She always does our bookings, usually directly with the hotels, which we've found works best, especially if we need to change something later. Only once, when we were in Rome for six weeks, did we use Airbnb, which got us a decent apartment in a great location, though it was initially so shabby that we asked for and got new IKEA furniture for the living room.  We prefer small hotels, though a few times that has meant no one at the desk overnight.

        We almost always purchase some sort of travel insurance, especially medical and evacuation insurance. Trip insurance came to our rescue when we had to cancel a long-planned and mostly paid-for trip to Africa in 2023.  It also reimbursed us for expenses when I had an ear infection in Morocco and Jane had a fever in Panama. We found that using Chase Travel insurance, which is Eclaims.com, was a very difficult experience. So, we would recommend getting your own trip insurance if it is a costly trip with a lot of prepaid expenses. 

       Once the flights and hotels are booked, rental car reserved (I use Hertz abroad because in my experience it's the only international company where the final charge is what was originally quoted), and we think we're all set, Jane starts checking for price changes.  Thanks to dynamic pricing, a hotel room reserved at one price might later be available at a lower price.  And if you book directly with the hotel, a phone call or an email might quickly get you the lower price. I can't tell you how many times that has happened.  

       Don't forget to think about getting from your arrival airport to your first hotel.  In a familiar city, you might be comfortable popping into a cab or onto mass transit. We took a train from Charles de Gaulle Airport to our hotel in the Haut Marais a decade ago in Paris. Most often, though, we ask our hotel to arrange a car for us, so that as we're leaving the terminal, someone will be holding a sign with our name on it. No wondering if a taxi driver is taking a long detour or otherwise overcharging us. Being met by someone is especially a good idea if your flight arrives late or you're in an undeveloped country. 

      Then we pack, one carry-on wheeled suitcase each along with another small bag each. Sometimes we check bags, sometimes we don't.  We have electrical adapters for almost every country along with a compact power strip with USB charging ports.  We have in the past, upon arrival, bought smart phones for France, Italy and New Zealand.  As I write this, we're a couple weeks away from an almost six-week trip to Madrid and southern Spain, and we're hoping to put a Spanish sim card into one of our unlocked Samsung Galaxy phones.  Smart phones are vital for GPS, looking up restaurants and language translation.  

      Then we're off, always elated to be headed somewhere.