Taking off Travel blog

Planning my next trip made me reflect on how much the process has changed since I took my first self-planned trip. I was 22 and a group of girls from work were off to Miami for a long weekend. We phoned up a travel agent, booked and paid for our tickets and hoped we’d be allocated a good hotel. While some people still book their trips like that, a lot more now take the guesswork out of it with readily available tools.

A Street’s Eye View

One of the best of these is Google Maps. Used in conjunction with an excellent travel forum or website, it’s a great way to get a street’s eye view of the places you might visit or want to stay. Here’s how we use it. Once we’ve decided on the destination, we start looking for good hotels and local attractions.

Where To Stay?

TripAdvisor is a great resource for quickly finding out what other travelers have enjoyed in a given city and you can use the locations to work out where it might be good to stay. Then it’s over to Hotwire to see if there are any bargain hotels. Once I have a shortlist, then it’s over to Google Maps to see how everything stacks up. Is the hotel close enough to the attractions I want to visit? Is it going to be noisy?  I was able to rule out one hotel, simply because I could see that it was in the flight path.

Narrowing The Search

With a little tweaking, we were able to find places that were close enough to major roads for convenience, yet far enough away to avoid noise pollution. We were also able to use street view to see where the nearest restaurants are. I also plan to see which are the best places to eat by using Where The Locals Eat.

What’s On?

Once that’s done you see what events are available in your destination by visiting What’s On When (or Joobili if you’re visiting Europe) or you can visit Offbeat Guides to build your own travel guide.

Of course, I’m not saying that removing the guesswork from trip planning is a good thing. Sometimes, it’s good to just catch a last minute flight to wherever, try some couchsurfing and wait for adventure to arrive. Which option do you prefer? Which are your favorite trip planning tools?

Photo by Nezemnaya

Sometimes you take a business trip and get back home, only to find that an old friend or colleague was in the same city at the same time. Think of the wasted opportunities to get together and have a bit of fun after a day of meetings. One way to avoid that happening is to use Dopplr. This site provides a simple way to keep track of your travel plans and share them with others whom you trust.

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