How To Book A Big Trip Overseas Without A Travel Agent
How To Book A Big Trip Overseas Without A Travel Agent
For me personally, the planning process of a big overseas trip is a big chunk of the fun and I often get questions asking whether we have a travel agent help us out with our trips and the answer is always, absolutely not!
Sitting down on a Sunday and planning out a holiday is one of my favourite things in the world and with the help of so many great great travel websites and search engines, it’s never been easier to organise and plan an amazing overseas experience by yourself.
Here are my tips on how to plan the travel yourself and feel organised while doing it!
Start planning early.
This part is absolutely crucial. All of the best accomodation spots get booked out no matter where you travel to and you’re always going to find cheaper deals this way. Last year we started booking accomodation in January for our big trip in July - October. We found so many great, cheap hostels + hotels ($100 nzd per night for a private room with a double bed in a cool, trendy hostel) but like I mentioned, the best ones are gone very quickly! It’s also nice to know how much money you’ve spent/need to save and budget for by knowing how much you’re going to spend early on. Also worth mentioning to make sure your passport isn’t expired!
Write a list of countries, cities and towns that you’ve like to visit.
My favourite part. Where do you want to go? It sounds really lame and cliche, but I get all of my travel inspiration from Instagram. I save photos of beautiful places in my folders and refer back to them when I want to go overseas!
Print out a map and plan out an efficient travel route.
It could be so easy to say “I want to visit Amsterdam and then go to Rome” to then realise these cities are really far away from each other and there are probably a lot of other places in between them that you’d also like to visit along the way. This is going to stop you from travelling in a zig zag where you end up wasting a lot of time and money and give you a good overview of your journey.
Think about how you’re going to get around.
I’m a big fan of taking trains but some places won’t always have a train connecting them and you may need to take a flight! We used a 3 Month Eurail Pass to get around Europe but some cities don’t connect via train or the journey’s were going to take 12 hours+ so we’d take a flight instead. Depending on where you’re travelling to, you may need to think about ferry’s (Greece & Croatia) or a standard hotel driver (Bali).
Write up a draft itinerary in a word document.
This is the easiest way to see a clear overview of your trip and where you might need to add in some more days or think about travel days where you’ll have to be checked out of your hotel and onto the next train/plane. You have to take those days into consideration to make sure you have enough time in each city. For example Amsterdam is a small city so you probably only need 1-2 days, whereas in Lagos you would definitely want 2-3 days to make the most of all the. beaches. Make sure there are easy ways to get between each place whether it’s a flight or a bus etc before you book anything!
Look for the best International flight deals on flight search engines.
I have found the most insanely cheap flights through websites such as Webjet and Skyscanner. I always start planning a trip by booking the main return flight out of home first as it tends to be one of the most expensive parts and then we book connecting flights and trains when we start booking accomodation! These websites are also really handy for booking flights in-between strange cities where there might be a cheap airline that you haven’t heard of. We found really cheap flights to get between Budapest - Croatia - Italy with the most random European airlines.
Research, compare and contrast your accomodation options.
Do your research on city locations to make sure you don’t find yourself anywhere sketchy, look through Booking.com, Air BnB or whether hiring a campervan and sleeping in campgrounds might suit you best. We found a lot of amazing, beautiful, trendy hostels (see a list of them here) In Europe where we had a private room with heaps of space and a double bed for $100 NZD per night (so $50 each for Liam and I). Sometimes you might have the private room but it’s a share bathroom scenario which is totally fine when you’re paying so little! Also double check when you’re able to check in and out of your accomodation so that you don’t find yourself stranded in a city for 7 hours before your next flight - trust me it’s not fun.
Finalise and make all of your bookings.
Get your main and connecting flights and accomodation booked and add all of the details into your word document itinerary with location, dates, airline, airport/train/bus station, times, when you need to check out of or into your accomodation etc. Make sure you have all of the information in there but also download all of your booking confirmation emails and pop them into a folder on your computer so that you don’t have to go looking for them in your emails later on if you need to double check something.
Where are you off to in 2020? Let me know in the comments!