I don’t know where I’m going, but I’ll get there someday.

Ah, finally, the time has come for me to begin planning for another trip. In a matter of milliseconds hundreds of possible locations come to mind. How do I pick the next place? Where do I begin? Thailand was easy. I knew from the get-go that I wanted that to be the first location abroad with my man. I know a lot of people that had been to Thailand prior to my trip so I was able to gather real, primary information about what I was getting myself into.

Now that its time for our third trip abroad together (Acapulco being the second), it’s becoming more of a challenge to pick the next location. My primary goal when picking a place to travel to is obviously to get the most bang for my buck and my secondary goal is to have a rich cultural experience. How do I go about finding this information?

Step One
Create a list of your top 3 potential locations.

Step Two
RESEARCH!! Now that you have your top three locations, its time to start figuring out the costs of the trips. I do this by researching 4 main things: airfare, currency exchange rate, cost of daily living in that country, and hotel/hostel rates. I do this for each location until I am able to get a general idea of what is going to be cheapest as a whole. Just because the airfare to a location is cheap, doesn’t mean that the hotels and cost of living are going to be cheap. It’s crucial that you understand your budget before you start buying airfare and making reservations.

Step Three
Now that you have narrowed it down to one location. It’s time to do the heavy research and plan the actual itinerary. It can take me anywhere from a week to 8 months to plan a successful trip. Obviously, the more time I have before a trip, the more I am able to research and create a flawless itinerary. When planning your itinerary, always start with your main flight to and from your destination. Doing this will allow you to start planning things down to the exact hour of landing and takeoff. Once you have your initial flight, then you can start adding in hotel stays, experiences, and any additional travel that will be done once in that country.

Step Four
Put it all together in a convenient travel app. I am completely obsessed with this app called “TripIt”. This app enables you to keep all your travel documents, confirmation numbers, itinerary, timeline and resources all in one convenient location. The best part is that it keeps track of all past trips as well so you can look back on previous experience and still find every detail of those trips.

This list may seem simple and rather incomplete, but I wanted to keep it vague in order for my readers to be able to explore their own methods of trip planning, and hopefully find a more effective way that works for them. Planning travel can be a difficult task but it’s highly rewarding when you get back and are able to talk about every single detail of the trip knowing that you put the entire thing together yourself and were able to cater the trip to your desires.

If you have any questions about how I plan my trips or need help planning a trip of your own, please, contact me and I will help you through the process to the best of my abilities.

Happy travels fellow bloggers :]