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So you’ve decided you want to take some time off to travel. There are hundreds of articles out there that will tell you to book a one way ticket to your first destination, maybe book your first night of accommodation, and to go from there.
If that is how you like to travel, then go for it! It sounds very spontaneous and free-spirited. No one in my entire life has used either of those adjectives to describe me, and likely, no one ever will. Jerry and I are organised, type-A, frugal deal-hunters. We love to plan. We plan trips that we don’t go on. We plan trips for our friends and family (at this point, I’m surprised Jerry doesn’t have an emailing list to send out flight deals to when he finds them…)
You also might be reading this because you are a member of our community who is wondering what on earth we are doing, or how we landed where we are now! If so, welcome to the inside of our travel planning brains (everything is alphabetised and colour coded in here).
When we first decided to travel for a year, we read countless blog posts about taking a year off, and got a real sense of cognitive dissonance. Every other trip we’ve ever taken, we’ve front-loaded a bunch of research, booked our accommodation and transport online, and known our exact route from the get-go. We leave space for planning what to do on each day til closer to the time, but we tend to have a good idea of the types of activities we want to experience before we get to that location. Yet every article we read suggested this is impossible in a year-long trip. So, where do you even start?
The Dream Stage
Our first step was to write down all the places we thought we wanted to go. The dream stage has done wonders for our geography, as we both tended to have a world map open to see where places were in relation to each other, to see what might go together. Jerry and I are big fans of YouTube travellers, so we watched lots of videos in different locations, and we have exhausted most of the Expedia Travel Guides on YouTube as well.
Lonely Planet guides, the travel section at Hamilton City Library, people’s bucket lists online; we read a lot. I don’t know how many dates of ours were set at a cafe with a pile of travel guides and a hot drink.
The funny thing is, at the start, we truly thought we’d be able to go everywhere in a year. A year is a long time! Turns out, it’s not that long, and our budget did not cater for endless flights. So that brings us to stage number 2.
Trying to visualise where you're going? We used My Maps on Google to plot our potential routes.
The Budget Stage
Everyone feels different about budgets. Budgets are Jerry’s baby; he is the budget-father. When I talked to him about what to put in this section, he felt it was important to acknowledge that the budget stage is not a concrete stage. For us, we started by looking at our financial situation and figuring out how much we could afford to spend. That included a bunch of permutations - what if we go now, what if we go in a year, two years, three years… These permutations were important to us, as they helped us to highlight what was important. If we could go a year sooner, was that better than adding three extra countries? Every decision is personal, so we spent a lot of time discussing this.
For a frame of reference, a common price point listed online was 40-50,000 USD, but it was hard to know what exactly was included or excluded from this number, and what "comfortable" travel looked like for them (PSA: It is definitely not the same for everyone!) We used that range as a starting anchor point in our minds, with a lot of potential wiggle room (I cover more detail about what our budget looks like now). Jerry has a budgeting template on Excel, which we used on a big scale for this trip. The categories we explored were per day costs, such as accommodation, food, transport in the city, as well as activities, intercity transport, and big miscellaneous costs. This was done concurrently with route planning.
I’m Claiming a Route (if you’ve never played Ticket to Ride, then this reference is lost on you)
So our big list of destinations needed to start forming into a route. This was my favourite stage. It feels a bit like doing a puzzle; you’re trying to see how things fit together. The obvious point you’re considering in this is proximity - it doesn’t make sense to go from Peru to Japan, then back to Bolivia, for example. However, there were a few other considerations we had.
Climate
What is the weather like at different times of year in this area? For us, this came into play in a big way in South East Asia, as we wanted to dodge the hot season, which is around April, and our preference was to be there in the cool season, from December - February. Another example is Mexico, where the hurricane season is in full force from July through October, and they have a lot of sargassum seaweed at this time too. When we were planning to visit Egypt, we had a very narrow time window of when we thought we could survive the temperatures! Climate was particularly important for us, as Jerry does not do well in the heat. For other people, you might be trying to avoid being too cold! In an ideal world, we would explore the whole world in autumn, with maybe a bit of spring thrown in there. Obviously, that is not possible, so there’s always an element of give and take.
When is a good time to visit? This table is a good place to start. In countries closer to the equator, keep an eye out for rainy season or monsoons.
Tourist season
The flip side to climate is thinking about the tourist season. When is the busy season? Our favourite is if we can be somewhere for a shoulder season, when there aren’t quite so many tourists, but there is still good weather. This was particularly more important in the tourist hot spots. For us, climate usually won out in this tussle, so we hit South East Asia in peak season, and similarly we’ll be in Peru at the peak season as well.
Festivals and events
Sometimes, you consider the proximity, the climate, the amount of tourists, and then you ignore it all because there’s something more important. For us, that has been because of festivals and events that we wanted to be there for. A few festivals/events we’re chasing this year:
Christmas markets in Europe
Tết, or Lunar New Year, in Vietnam
Sakura, or Cherry Blossom Season, in Japan
El Día de los Muertos, or the the Day of the Dead, in Mexico
Thanksgiving in the USA
Other events included opportunities to visit friends and family at specific times of the year, or when they can take time off.
Doing this helped us identify a rough itinerary. Which continent were we on at which time? What were the anchor dates around festivals that couldn’t change? In an ideal world, we would’ve done one loop around the world, travelling west. But, like I said, sometimes you throw that plan out because your mum is going to the Christmas markets and you want to come too! This planning also helped us to start cutting down on destinations. Morocco was a top destination for us, but it was simply too hot at the time of the year that it could fit into the route. We thought we’d have a month in China, but it fit too far into the trip for us to get a visa (we needed to be in New Zealand when we applied for the visa, and would’ve expired if we’d gotten it before we left).
We bounced between budgeting and route planning for quite some time. There are a few websites that give you a rough idea of how much you spend in a day in different countries, and we looked on Booking.com, Airbnb, and Agoda to roughly get a number for per night accommodation. To keep the budget reasonable, we mostly targeted areas that had a lower per-day cost, or we moved more quickly in the non-negotiable countries with higher expenses (I am looking at you, Japan!). Choosing regions has been our biggest cost saver.
How expensive is your chosen country? Price of Travel has some general summaries of costs.
The miscellaneous and activities sections were rough estimates that we refined over time. This budget is a living being. We don’t mind sharing that it has stabilised at around 75,000 NZD for the both of us (we started in the sixties, but then realised we are no longer in our shared dorm hostel life, and we prioritised some activities and routes, such as visiting the Amazon rainforest, hiking to Machu Picchu, spending three days in Angkor Wat, being in Japan for the cherry blossoms, etc.) That’s roughly 46,000 in USD. Now we’re on the trip, we mostly use the budget to see if we are spending how much we thought we would. We can’t do every single activity, so we budgeted for all the “must do” activities (we did not go stingy on what was considered a must do, since the activities are such a big part of why we travel), plus a few thousand dollars to pick other “like to do” activities. We’re not going to stop eating if we go over budget in food, and we’re lucky that we will be able to survive going over budget. Currently, we’re mostly on track with food, but we’ll see how we go! Exchange rates have a way bigger impact on our costs than I ever would have thought, since we're travelling for a long time. We use a Wise card as our main access to money, which has kept the conversion fees and ATM withdrawal costs low.
We want to acknowledge that we are fortunate to be a couple. As well as giving us each another person to share these amazing experiences, bounce ideas off, and to hold our bag while we go to the toilet, it also saves us money. It saves us lots on accommodation, because we share the room. If we choose to Grab/Uber/taxi somewhere (sometimes for convenience, sometimes for safety) we get to split that cost. We can’t speak to the costs of solo travelling, because neither of us have done it.
Okay, now for the bits that are really Type A
We still book in advance, with one caveat. Free cancellation is a powerful tool, and we use it a lot. Jerry and I book our accommodation early, often 6-9 months in advance. We have occasionally needed to change our plans, so that has meant we’ve cancelled chunks of accommodation when we re-routed. For example, we’ve just decided on a slightly different route through the Balkans in May/June, so we’ve had to cancel and rebook. It can be fiddly, but doing this has saved us SO MUCH MONEY. If you tried to book in Tokyo now, two months out, you’d be paying three to four times as much for the same spot (or it would be gone).
We set our filters to “free cancellation, rated above 8/10, sort by price from low to high”, then scroll til we find our sweet spot. Reviews are your friend! Key things we look for are complaints about noise, and the safety of the area. Small spaces and stairs without elevator access are not an issue for us, so we often end up in places that have those complaints! We don’t do shared rooms anymore, but we’ll settle for a shared bathroom for some of the time. We check on the map to see how close it is to the central city, and try to keep ourselves either a) walkable within the city centre (e.g. less than 20 minutes to walk in) or b) close to public transport that can take us there. A is more common in smaller towns or cities, and B is more common in big cities. A great tip from one of Jerry’s good friends, which we live by, is to make sure you vary your accommodation. We really appreciate our hotel stays when we dot them through, mixed with homestays, private rooms in a hostel, Airbnbs… Everything has its positives and challenges, but varying it means we don’t get too much of one challenge! We use a mix of Agoda and Booking.com in Asia, and a mix of AirBnB and booking.com in Europe and South America.
We booked key activities, like Christmas day’s Nutcracker ballet, Auschwitz-Birkenau tickets, the Miyako Odori performance in Kyoto, our Machu Picchu hike, and our time in the Amazon well in advance. We currently sit at roughly 2 weeks to one month before for transport and smaller activities. GetYourGuide is another great spot for booking activities, as it has a great cancellation policy. Some sites are pretty universal (booking.com, GetYourGuide), but it's worth looking into which sites are commonly used where. For example, what we've found:
Tripadvisor is still alive and strong in South East Asia.
Klook is working with the Taiwanese government for all their tourism marketing, so there are lots of deals there.
12go is a solid transport booking option through Asia, including buses and trains.
We have so far had to cancel two intercity buses; one gave us credit which we’ll use in the Balkans later in the trip, and the other had a 75% refund policy. This ended up being worth it, as it gives us a chance to take someone’s recommendation and visit a more off-the-beaten path spot. Yes, we’ve lost a small amount of money, but we have saved thousands by booking other things in advance. Occasionally this isn't the best method - in Vietnam, it probably would have been easier to book transport at our homestays. However, there were trains and buses booked out for Tet, so we could have ended up with that issue instead.
The other type A element is all of the research into insurance, vaccinations, visas… In my opinion, you’ll probably need to do it at some point. We did our insurance very early on, so the bookings we had made would be covered, if we had to cancel the trip for some reason (thankfully, that hasn’t happened so far!) I think of vaccinations as the chance to not have to deal with it on the trip by paying a bit more now. For example, we spent money to both get the rabies vaccines, so we have more time to get to a hospital it if we get bitten by a dog or monkey while we’re on the trip, and don’t have to spend thousands on last minute flights to get to Bangkok, or a private transfer out of a rural area.
Do you need a visa for the countries you're visiting? Kiwis, find out here
We track all of this on one mega spreadsheet. It’s Jerry’s labour of love, and has so many gorgeously nerdy features (the inflation buffer was my personal favourite, and the auto conversion to NZD is another great touch. We even have a column to track if our accommodation includes a washing machine/laundry service, and if there is free breakfast included). I’m trying to convince him he should sell the template online, because it is so comprehensive.
Do you lose flexibility?
Yes. You do. I cannot wake up in a city and decide I want to spend two months here, without giving myself a headache of cancellations and re-bookings. To do things the way we have, we have sacrificed that element. That doesn’t mean we can’t change (we already have, several times. My booking.com bookings page is carnage in some parts), but we do have anchor points that are cost-prohibitive to move (flights between continents, for example). To combat this, we’ve tried to give ourselves more time than we need in places, so we’re more likely to feel we had too much time somewhere, rather than not enough. If we end up feeling like we don’t have enough time, we’ll just have to come back!
So, what do you gain?
The obvious answer here is money. Booking earlier often means cheaper prices, particularly if you get last season’s prices for the following season (this was particularly noticeable in Japan, Singapore, Greece, and Albania).
The other, less tangible gain is that we have more time to just be on the trip, rather than planning or booking. Yes, we have the odd bus or flight to book, but our accommodation for most of the trip is sorted already, we just need to rock up. This means we spend that time narrowing down which activities we want to do (from my giant master list of fun activities around the world, recommendations from other travellers, searching through GetYourGuide and TripAdvisor, and sometimes just by walking past). We know what weather to expect, rough ideas of when places might be open or closed, and we know what food we want to try (that last one is more of a passion than a by-product, though…).
This approach is definitely not for everyone. In fact, I’d go as far to say that it’s not the way for most people. I’m not here to convince you to travel the way we do, I’m just here to put it out in the universe that it’s possible. Not every single world traveller is seeing where the wind takes them. If you want to keep to a budget and you love planning (or maybe you dream of moonlighting as a travel agent), this could be for you. We initially spent the first few months saying “there’s no way we could plan this trip the way we’ve planned for others”, as we continued to plan it exactly the same way. Somehow, we’ve stumbled upon the fact that we can!
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