Planning a Trip

When planning a trip it can be both exciting and overwhelming at the same time. After years of independently of planning our own trips we have picked up some tips and tricks along the way. We have put this guide together to help you plan your next adventure, providing you with tips on how to how to find cheap accommodation & flights and picking the insurance policy that is right for you.

Flights

When we first begin to plan our travels we start with pricing and finding flights. We find Skyscanner the best app to find deals. On Skyscanner you can put in your departure airport, select your dates and set your arrival airport to “anywhere”. Skyscanner will then pull all the flights departing from your airport on your chosen dates and sort them in order of low to high. This is one of our favourite features and we have used it many times to decide where to go next, based on price. You can also use Skyscanner to set flight alerts. If you have a destination in mind for set dates, set your flight alerts and Skyscanner will notify you of price changes.

Accommodation

After you have your flights booked you will then be researching where to stay. Depending on your trip you might decide to leave your itinerary open and book accommodation as you go. If your more of the organised type you might prefer to book before you arrive. When traveling to pricier locations such as Europe, USA, Australia we find its best to book accommodation at least one week in advance due to availability and price. During peak season you may want to look earlier. In cheaper destinations such as Asia you can get away with booking the day before or even that day. When we travel in Asia we prefer to travel this way as it leaves our plans open to change.

Booking our accommodation we mainly use booking.com or Airbnb. Booking.com has a wide variety of accommodation options from hostels, hotels to apartments and to be honest their prices are usually the cheapest. With booking.com if you are a regular user you qualify for their “genius membership” this provides you with 10% – 15% off your booking.

Airbnb is great for a more unique local experience such as a farm stay. (Check out our recent blog on a farm stay in Japan we booked through Airbnb). If you haven’t tried Airbnb yet CLICK HERE to get a discount off your first stay.

Travel Insurance

Travel insurance is one of those things we questioned if it was really necessary. Honestly, for our short weekend breaks or our two week holidays we never took out travel insurance. Thankfully we were always lucky enough to not need it. Now that we are long term travellers we have taken out a policy with World Nomads. We are still lucky enough to never have needed to use it. However it does provide us with piece of mind, that if we fell ill or flights got cancelled we would be covered and not out of pocket.

We chose to get our travel insurance with World Nomads as they are the market leader for long term adventure travel. You can take out a worldwide policy for up to a year. The application was straight forward and can be done online in a matter of minutes. We recommend you research a few insurance providers and find the insurer best for you. Make sure you read your policy to make sure you are covered for all the activities you want to do on your trip.