Trip planning can be a beast of an undertaking. If keeping train and plane schedules, rental car reservation numbers and hotel addresses organized wasn't enough, you also have to ensure everyone in your party is happy. My family calls me the "cruise director" - always plotting and organizing to ensure everything runs smoothly and everyone gets what they want.
Like any bonafide cruise director, I do this using the tools of the trade. Here are a few apps and tools I use when planning a trip to keep myself, and my travel party, organized.
Pre-Planning: At this stage you and your travel party are trying to decide where you want to go. You may want to go to the beach, your friend wants lots of nightlife, and your other friend wants to Eat/Pray/Love for two weeks abroad. Three different expectations, with three different budgets. It's important to align on trip expectations before you get too far along in planning your trip.
Facebook Groups - Private Facebook groups are a perfect forum for pre-planning a trip, especially for large parties. I like to create polls to get everyone thinking about potential places they would like to visit and let democracy take care of the rest. Once we get down to two/three top destinations, I create a new poll where group members can only vote for one place to visit. Separately, I have polls to determine what months work best for everyone, where we'll stay, etc.
Facebook Groups also have "Recommendations," which place recommended destinations on a map. This allows everyone in the group to add different restaurants and activities that they want to do in one place. It also allows for easy sharing and discussion amongst the members of the group.
Planning: At this stage you're planning activities, budgeting time/money and booking reservations. Currently, I'm planning four trips for the coming year, so staying organized (and budgeted) is essential. Things can get out-of-hand quickly if you don't have a system in place to organize the influx of data during this stage of trip planning.
GoogleDrive - Google's free cloud drive allows you to create spreadsheets, documents, maps, etc. to share with your travel companions and update in real-time. I use GoogleSheets to create budget forecasts that help me to realistically determine how much I'm going to spend for the trip duration (ex. $50-$75 a day for meals x 7 days). This is a great document to align on with your travel companions to ensure everyone has similar spending expectations. Another way I use GoogleSheets is to list hotels and their associated costs. This is a great way to keep a list of researched accommodations organized and comparable.
I also find GoogleSheets helpful when documenting expenditures and keeping track of how much money I owe my friends and vice/versa when booking accommodations, rental cars, train tickets, etc. When it comes to money, everyone appreciates an organized planner! Plus, the GoogleDrive mobile app makes it easy to update remotely, so you don't have to worry about forgetting that you owe your friend $200 for your portion of the hotel bill. Splitwise is a similar application that I've heard good things about. I've never used this app, but plan on testing it out soon. It's free in the Apple App Store.
The maps feature allows you to add pins and icons to places you want to eat, stay, or see at the destination. Pins can have unique icons and colors, which can come in handy if you have multiple people to please and want to keep everyone's must-dos organized. Additionally, you can add layers for driving directions, which is great when planning a road trip. This data is associated with your google account, so I expect you have access to these pins when using a GoogleMaps on your mobile device remotely. I haven't tested this out myself, so let me know if that's not the case in the comments!
TripAdvisor - This tool is an all-around great resource during the planning stage. I often refer to TripAdvisor when considering accommodations. I find the user reviews easy to navigate and search. For example, if I want to know if a hotel has free parking, I can search for "parking" in the reviews and only relevant reviews populate. Similarly, I appreciate the guest photos of the hotels. It's always surprising to see the difference between a guest's photo of the bathroom and the hotel's highly stylized, perfectly lit and fisheye lensed version.
More recently I've come to find that TripAdvisor has added a map feature, similar to the GoogleMaps version above. This allow you to create a trip and plot different hotels, activities and dining experiences on a map. This helps exponentially when considering a hotel. For example, I'm planning a trip to NYC and was able to quickly cut 10 potential hotels after seeing them on a map compared to the activities I'm considering for the trip.
Conde Nast's "Women Who Travel" Facebook Group - Sorry gents, this forum is for ladies only. I recently stumbled upon this closed group on Facebook and can't recommend it enough for my fellow wanderlusters. The page is invite only and is a forum for women around the world to discuss anything and everything travel. I've found this forum to be a great place to get ideas and read about other women's trips to destinations near and far. When planning a trip, I usually look here to see if people have asked questions or provided recommendations for the destinations I'm considering. I usually get a several responses within the hour!
Blogs, Forums, Pinterest - Of course there are thousands of travel blogs, forums and Pinterest for those of us that need a little inspiration. I sought out several travel blogs discussing road tripping through Scotland before my trip in 2017. I learned about the routes they took, how Scottish petrol stations work, and tips about driving on the right-side of the car!
Hopper - If you're not ready to book your airfare, but you don't want to miss a good deal, I recommend letting Hopper do the heavy lifting. This free mobile app allows you to input your travel dates and destination, from which it will search for the best rates across carriers. I spent $850 round trip on my flight to Heathrow in the summer of 2017 - a deal I wouldn't have known about without Hopper notifying me that it was time to make my airfare purchase. The only downside to this app is it excludes certain carriers (Southwest...) and the costs listed are the absolute minimum (doesn't include fees, luggage, upgrades, etc.), which can be deceptive. However, this is a great tool to use when shopping flights.
Trip: You're at your destination, living your best life. So you really don't want to lug around a portfolio filled with printed itineraries and booking confirmations, do you?
TripCase - If you learn anything from this blog, I hope it's that you NEED TripCase. N-E-E-D. TripCase is a one-stop app that allows you to manage and store all of your booking confirmations, phone numbers, maps, etc. all in a sharable, digital itinerary. The app can send you push notifications alerting you of terminal changes, and it allows you to store receipts (which is especially handy when traveling for work). As soon as I book anything in the planning stage it goes straight into my TripCase.
You can make calls and get directions directly within the app. It also syncs with Uber if you're wanting to grab a ride to/from your destination. With permission, you can enable your location services to be used when the app isn't in use (not recommended if you're traveling abroad) to send you push notifications when it's time to leave to ensure you don't miss your flight or dinner reservation. There's even a weather forecast.
I also like that I can store all of my old trips if I ever want to go back and reference anything. Over the year's I've referred to old itineraries more often than you'd expect!
Post-Trip: You're back home and ready to reminisce. But first...laundry.
Dropbox - Any file sharing service can be used to share photos with your travel companions. I find Dropbox to be the most user friendly, but you can also create shared photo albums in iCloud, Office 365, and Google Photos.
Shutterfly - If you have the time, talent and energy, Shutterfly scrapbooks are a nice way to capture your trip in a bound photo book.
Chatbooks - Don't have the time, talent or energy? Chatbooks are an inexpensive and easier alternative to the Shutterfly photo book. While I've never made one myself, I've heard that they are very easy to make with the Chatbooks app.
Been - The Been app is a new discovery of mine. After you cross and state or country off of your list, add it to your Been app. I've only seen 4% of the world according to Been. I better start packing!
Safe travels.
AB
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