First Steps

This is my travel blog where I'm going to share my experiences and advice from my travel adventures over the next few years (if i can afford it).

There's not really a right or wrong way to plan and prepare for a holiday, but i'm going to share what I do and my opinions on the methods to try help other people when they come to planning their holiday. The first thing you do need to do though is decide where to go.

Two of my friends and I are on gaps years which means we can travel pretty much whenever we want and for however long we want so we really aren't restricted with where we can go and what we can do. However luckily we all agreed we want to go to Asia, which was a good starting point. We didn't know exactly where in Asia at that point but with a bit of research that came quickly.

We started by thinking about our timescale, ideally we wanted to go away for around a month so we had plenty of time to go everywhere we wanted without being away from home for too long. With this in mind we decided we should visit 3 or 4 countries so we had a week in each. Top on my list was Thailand and my friends were both very keen to go to Vietnam, so it only made sense to stay in that area and visit Cambodia and possibly Laos too.

So now we had the countries in mind, we needed to know where to go in the countries to book flights. After looking at a map and trying to devise a route, I decided it was best to fly into the north of Vietnam, travel down the country, cross over into Cambodia then Thailand and travel down to the south of Thailand where our journey would end. It made sense to follow a fairly straight line around rather than going backwards and forwards between places.

Now that there is a rough route you need to decide on your destinations and how you're getting there. Although we still haven't decided on destinations I found a map of all long distance trains, busses and ferry's around south east Asia and it seemed easy abouts to get to all the major destinations so we decided to work that our later and concentrate on getting flights as the closer the date comes the more expensive it would be.

We got all this done in the space of about 2 weeks it didn't take us long at all to make desicions so you can't really be indecisive when trying to plan a holiday, otherwise things will never get organised which we had learnt in the past. So here's my steps on how to start organising your holiday.

1- Get together a group of people, the smaller the easier it is to organise, who you know can afford the holiday and you can trust. This is important, if they can't a doors it or can't be trusted chances are if won't ever get booked and you won't go.

2- Decide on a general location as a group, then decide on a timeframe taking into consideration finance, prior commitments and work. Booking the holiday isn't the only cost, the longer you stay the more spending money you'll need too, you also need a time you can all go and get the time off work if necessary.

3-Once you have your location(s) and timescale, if it's a multi destination holiday start to think about how long you want to spend in each place, then you can work out how many places you can realistically visit in the time you've got. Once you know that you can start choosing your top destinations by researching them online, there's loads of useful websites out there however one of my favourites is Lonely Planet (they also do some very useful handbooks). If it's a single destination holiday you can skip this and the next step and go straight into looking at flights.

4- Now you need to plan the most efficient and cost effective route between your destinations, try to avoid going backwards and forwards to save time, and travel by local busses and trains rather than planes to save money. Most countries have a national train system. These busses and trains don't usually have to be booked in advance as tickets. and be bought at the station, however you need to know if there actually is transport operating between your destinations so you can get there.

5- Now you've got your route with your start and end destinations you can start to look at flights. Bear in mind however that it may be cheaper in terms of flights to reverse your route, so stay open to the idea of doing things slightly differently to your initial plan.