We often begin planning our big trips years in advance. They typically start with a place we want to be at a certain time of year, for instance: Bavaria at Oktoberfest or Provence in France when the lavender is blooming or Iceland for the Northern Lights or Washington DC or Japan for the cherry blossoms. Then we draft a skeletal structure and a general duration, pulling in ideas captured over the years from books, articles, blogs and friends’ suggestions. We balance durations with a love of the places we live (and a desire to spend time at home) with a passion for seeing new things and experiencing new places.
Booking Accommodations. We are big users of Booking.com for hotels and Airbnb.com for houses and apartments. We use the Marriott Bonvoy app (mostly for accommodations in the USA) to continue feeding David’s Gold status from years of business travel and we belong to the predominant Portuguese hotel brands rewards programs (Pestana, Montbelo and IHG) for when we travel around Portugal.
A couple of notes on both sites. First, Booking. You need to make sure that your email address for all of your reservations is the same. If you use the same log-in ID but multiple email addresses, then you won’t get your status and be able to see all of our bookings on the App or when you log in. It seems a fixable problem, but we’ve called tech support a few times to try to get a fix and also merge status and old reservations from an old email address to the current one and they’ve been, well, not that supportive. On Airbnb, we are picky. We (Melissa) read all of the reviews, we try hard to narrow down location on the map, study (again Melissa) every picture to try to catch anything weird and don’t take anything below a 4.8 rating (out of 5). Our first one was a little disappointing in a weird, dark, lower-income building in Hawaii. We never felt unsafe but learned some lessons through that experience.
We aren’t big points people, though we do accumulate and use them and are pretty loyal to Marriott Hotels, TAP (Air Portugal) and United Airlines (David is on the cusp of being a million-mile flyer with United thanks to 30+ years of business travel). If you are big into hotel and airline points, The Points Guy is a great reference and they have an app you can use to pull in all of your loyalty programs, branded credit cards, etc. into one place.
The following is a list of other sites of which we are religious users which you might find helpful if you are planning a trip, large or small, pretty much anywhere in the world.
1. Rome2Rio. We first wrote about Rome2Rio when we started this blog and didn’t have much travel to write about from the comfort of our Denver home as we began planning our long and winding worldwide trek. We (mostly Melissa) continue to be avid users as we map out the practicality of each trip’s skeletal draft, often providing a much-needed reality check. Sometimes things just take a lot longer than you think they would when you look on a paper map or Google Earth (or as they might say in rural Maine: you can’t get there from here).
They have recently (as of this writing in Spring 2024) brought back and enhanced a feature where you can plan out a multi-stop trip (existed before and disappeared but now it’s back), create a nice map and even save it (great new features) if you create a log-in on the site.
2. Google Flights. Particularly if we are planning a trip with a lot of flights, Google Flights is a godsend. It helps us figure out which airlines fly certain routes (we are picky and only fly airlines with 7-star safety ratings (see the criteria here), by Airline Ratings.com) and determine if we want to lay over for several days in a connecting city. On Google flights you can enter round trips, one-way or multi-leg flights and select class of service which can give you sense of the budget for each leg of your trip. It will pull in multiple airlines’ options into your search results.
Our second, and more frequent, use of Google flights is to track the cost of a flight. Once we know the date range of a flight which we want to take from one city to another, we track the prices of that flight so we can get a sense for the cost and know when a good deal is to be found. Check out/download our guide below for using Google Flights.
We also use Seat Guru to help determine if our seat choices are comfortable and quiet, particularly if it is a new airline or aircraft for us.
3. Cruise Critic. We aren’t, yet anyway, big cruisers. In fact, to date, we’ve been on only one together. But. We do plan to use cruises as a method to see parts of the world which are difficult to get to (think: Antarctica) or to see lots of water-bound places conveniently (think: Carribean or the Third Island chain/Fiji) or to travel to parts of the world where we feel safer under the watch and care of an experienced group (think: parts of Central America).
There are also some fantastic looking one-way cruises we have our eye on (revisiting the Panama Canal from Florida to California, going from Cape Town in South Africa to Singapore, etc.).
We expect, over time, our use of cruises will increase. For now, within North America, parts of Asia and Europe anyway, we feel very comfortable making our own way on planes, trains and automobiles. But, when we are thinking about a cruise, Cruise Critic is a great site to use to scout out a cruise you are looking for.
Walking Apps. Once you’ve arrived, if you want to take a walk, these are the apps we swear by.
1. Rick Steves’ Audio Guides. Once we get to our destination (if we’re in Europe), we use Rick Steves’ audio guides and, in particular, his walking tours on his easy-to-use and easy-to-download app. You can download them when connected to Wi-Fi and then roam data-plan/wi-fi free when you’re on the tour. He also has lots of content about the European country and city you’re visiting.
2. Hiking with AllTrails. I am a loyal AllTrails app user for hikes. Like with Rick Steves, if you download the trail in advance (if you use the pay version, which isn’t that expensive and totally worth it) you don’t need to worry about a cell signal when you get back in the woods or up on the mountain which I find essential. As any hiker will tell you, sometimes you can lose a trail. The AllTrails map will locate you in comparison to the mapped trail so you can navigate back on track. There are ratings, reviews and durations for you to use when planning your trip. You can also easily find hikes nearby when you’re connected to data. In Scotland, I found the Komoot app useful as well. Here is a helpful comparison of the two.
3. Ullmon Maps. Ullmon’s offline maps app CityMaps2Go can be useful for city maps, particularly if you didn’t get a data plan on your phone for your destination or are in a city for the first time. Download the map in advance and then you can use it to find your way.
If you’re planning a road trip via car, check out our tips for those here.
We will continue to add content here as we find other helpful tools and tips. Happy traveling!
The Traveling Ridleys 