- Joined
- Oct 13, 2010
- Messages
- 10,735
After having seen quite a posts here about how someone has planned to go to a certain location and get from place to place and do this list of things, that got me wondering how these plans first came about and how they were solidified.
There are probably some experienced travelers that might just say "I knew I wanted to do this, so I simply booked it". But let's take previous experience out of the picture. Let's just say all you had was a desire to do some interesting travel that lasts about 3 weeks and doesn't cost too horribly much.
So I imagine it starts as an idea (i.e. I'd like to experience Oktoberfest). So now you have a range of dates and a location. Booking air transportation seems straight forward, so let's say you fly right to Munich.
You "do" Oktoberfest and Munich in a few days, so you'll need ground transportation, hotel, plans for which beer garden to attend, tickets for events, other things to do while there, etc. Of course I could book air and hotel in 15 minutes, but would it be the right day? Would it be the right hotel? What would someone who went there before say I did wrong already, after only booking air and hotel?
Now that I've recovered from the beer, I want to take in some other sights, and figure I'd like the freedom that driving a rental car would afford. How do I know that I can even rent a car over there with my US drivers license? Or is a rental car a really dumb thing to attempt to do?
Maybe it would be nice to see the sights from a train (maybe there was a gotcha in the rental car agreement saying certain distance or countries were out of bounds). How do you find out what the interesting train routes would be?
These are just hypothetical questions; I don't want an answer to any of them specifically, but how would these questions be answered when one is planning a trip? A book? Find someone who's itinerary looks good and copy it? It just seems like there are so many variables and not many constraints.
My travel planning background has been limited: short and sweet trips (due to having been chained to megacorp's stingy vacation policies); fly in and out of the same place and stay in one hotel...simple. And cruises, which also don't really count, since planning them is also simple.
My travel style when doing road trips in the US is to NOT do hotel pre-booking, but usually we have a single destination (to stay with family) and don't do much of anything along the way. I'm not very good at improptu things (tend to shy away from spending time and money on something I haven't got at least a little background on).
That was more of a wandering question than I intended, but the core question is in the thread title. What, besides your own experience, are the tools, resources and processes one would use to put together a longish trip that will get you a reasonable bang for you buck and get you some travel memories worth having.
There are probably some experienced travelers that might just say "I knew I wanted to do this, so I simply booked it". But let's take previous experience out of the picture. Let's just say all you had was a desire to do some interesting travel that lasts about 3 weeks and doesn't cost too horribly much.
So I imagine it starts as an idea (i.e. I'd like to experience Oktoberfest). So now you have a range of dates and a location. Booking air transportation seems straight forward, so let's say you fly right to Munich.
You "do" Oktoberfest and Munich in a few days, so you'll need ground transportation, hotel, plans for which beer garden to attend, tickets for events, other things to do while there, etc. Of course I could book air and hotel in 15 minutes, but would it be the right day? Would it be the right hotel? What would someone who went there before say I did wrong already, after only booking air and hotel?
Now that I've recovered from the beer, I want to take in some other sights, and figure I'd like the freedom that driving a rental car would afford. How do I know that I can even rent a car over there with my US drivers license? Or is a rental car a really dumb thing to attempt to do?
Maybe it would be nice to see the sights from a train (maybe there was a gotcha in the rental car agreement saying certain distance or countries were out of bounds). How do you find out what the interesting train routes would be?
These are just hypothetical questions; I don't want an answer to any of them specifically, but how would these questions be answered when one is planning a trip? A book? Find someone who's itinerary looks good and copy it? It just seems like there are so many variables and not many constraints.
My travel planning background has been limited: short and sweet trips (due to having been chained to megacorp's stingy vacation policies); fly in and out of the same place and stay in one hotel...simple. And cruises, which also don't really count, since planning them is also simple.
My travel style when doing road trips in the US is to NOT do hotel pre-booking, but usually we have a single destination (to stay with family) and don't do much of anything along the way. I'm not very good at improptu things (tend to shy away from spending time and money on something I haven't got at least a little background on).
That was more of a wandering question than I intended, but the core question is in the thread title. What, besides your own experience, are the tools, resources and processes one would use to put together a longish trip that will get you a reasonable bang for you buck and get you some travel memories worth having.