New to travel? This very basic guide will walk you through everything it takes to plan a trip, from what to look for in a flight, all the way to planning out restaurants and bars.
Looking for inspiration? Check out our (very) complete London Guide.
Don’t know what to pack? Here’s Jess’s Packing List.
What is most important to us:
-
- Flight Comfort– no connections, no awkward flight times. (While this isn’t always possible, sometimes we do stay in a ‘layover’ city for a few nights just to avoid an airport connection)
- Hotels– no tiny rooms, with a focus on bars, gyms, and pools. (If the ‘best’ hotel has very small rooms, we’ll stay somewhere else)
- Restaurants
- Liveliness– we prefer cities. If we do stay outside of cities, it is important there is at least one or two restaurants/bars walking distance.
HOW WE PLAN
-
- Mapping out the trip– We usually visit many cities per trip. Rome2Rio is our favorite website/app for planning out the best transportation between locations- trains, planes, or cars. We save hotels, restaurants, and more on Google Maps, where we can download an offline map of each city before we arrive. We also get a general idea for available flights before moving forward.
- Choose a hotel– Location and room size are our top priorities (above), followed by amenities (pool, gym, bar) and reviews. Before we pick a hotel, we tend to look into restaurants we ‘must visit’ and try to find something walking distance. Sites like CN Traveller and Travel + Leisure provide good information on hotel quality. We also rely quite heavily on Google reviews (Jess’s favorite) and TripAdvisor (which Gio prefers). While we usually book through credit card companies, Jess’s mom is a travel agent and we use her for cruises and some hotels for additional perks.
- Look into restaurants– We each have systems for this that are similar, but we look separately and then compare notes before making our final choices. Jess’s process goes like this- 1. Make a list. 2. Search Eater, Thrillist, 50Best, Michelin, etc. 3. Google reviews 4. Zoom in on Google map and look for places close to the hotel we’ll likely stay at.
- Book– Book flights, hotels, and transportation. Create an itinerary and place everything on it. (Jess uses GoogleDocs, which can be shared live or converted into Excel).
- Research bars & things to do– Add to the list.
- Fill out the itinerary– One thing we have learned to do (that may not apply to everyone) is book lunch and dinner for every day of the trip. We will always call and cancel as far in advance as possible if we change our minds (we usually don’t- which is the beauty of doing so much research- and we do bold everywhere that takes a CC on the spreadsheets)… but we’ve learned that we prefer waking up each morning of vacation and knowing that all the decisions have already been made for us.
- Travel with carry ons– Every once in a while we will check a bag (usually when traveling with family that is checking or on teeny planes), but we almost always travel carry on. We don’t really need that much, and why would we wait in the airport any longer? It’s so nice to get off a plane and just go (we even did this for our month-long honeymoon). One thing to note- London Heathrow is wildly strict on liquids, so take extra care there (Jess once had her bag pulled because her liquids bag was unzipped).
- Then, we’re off!
