How to plan a trip

Planning a trip can be difficult sometimes.  I’ve been successfully planning trips for about 10 years, and even I run into road blocks and complications.  In my book How to be Your Own Travel Agent, I discuss some of my best tips and tricks for trip-planning.

Below is an excerpt titled “How exactly do you plan a trip?” from my book, How to be Your Own Travel Agent.

I get frustrated when I see a lot of inspirational travel quotes, and cool pictures of people on a remote island somewhere and I have no idea a. how they got there, b. how I can get there, or c. how much it costs.  I’m a practical person.  I want details.  There are a lot of travelers who want to inspire others to travel.  I’m more interested in getting you the details on how you can actually plan a trip once you’ve been “inspired” to do so.  Without the how-to-do-it, it’s sort of like telling someone who knows very little about soccer to “get out there and make a goal!”

I’m not going to just tell you to “plan a trip” I’m going to do my best to tell you how to plan a trip. As I said in the introduction, I want to empower you to plan a trip.  You know what you want to see (and if you don’t, I’ll even help with that), you need help to sit down and actually plan the darn thing.  In this book, you become your own travel agent by learning how to

Select an appropriate travel destination for you

Design an itinerary

Create a travel budget

Do research for your trip

Book flights and accommodations

There are a lot of other things I could talk about in terms of traveling, but to me, this is the most practical side of traveling.  If you can figure out these things, you can design your own trip to your exact specifications.  You can get destination-specific guides that give you details on the places you’re going, read endless blogs and books on all sorts of travel-related things, look at beautiful pictures all day… but right now, you just need some simple, practical advice on how to plan a trip.  I hope this guide helps you to K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid.)

To read the rest, get the book!