Planning a trip and traveling can be a formidable task. Whether you’re going away for the weekend or on a year-long voyage, we’d like to offer some of the tips and tools we use for our travels. If you’re planning your first trip, hopefully some of these recommendations can help.
If you’re experienced, you might have this down to a science. But I know the way we approach travel has evolved over the yers, so maybe there’s something here helpful for you, too.
Either way, we’re providing recommendations of products, applications, and strategies we actually use. Whether you’re looking for travel insurance, how to pack, find flights, discover new places to visit or something else, we’ll try to provide most everything you need here.
Finding a flight
Google Flights – This is my go-to when searching for flights. It does a nice job comparing (almost) all your options for flights when you know your dates and destination. The best part is that if you’re flexible on dates and/or destinations, you can explore your options fairly easily. For example, if you know you want to go somewhere in Europe, you can just enter “Europe” as your destination. Then you’ll have a chance to explore both the list and map revealing which European destinations you can go to with various prices. Similarly, you can go back to the input area for your dates and select “Flexible dates” to give you the best prices. After finding a good flight, if you can, I always suggest booking directly with the airline. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter, but it’s easier to deal with your airline in case something goes wrong. If you book through a random third-party website, you can get the run around from that website and the airline when you run into rebooking or cancellation issues.
SkyScanner – SkyScanner offers some great tools as well. I like cross-checking Google Flights and Skyscanner just to make sure there are no flights or options I missed. One tool I like is their “Get Price Alert” option. Google offers a similar tool, but for whatever reason, I don’t always get the alerts there. But SkyScanner is pretty reliable. You can also compare flights from multiple departure airports, os if you’re lucky enough to have multiple accessible airports, you can find the cheapest/best option. SkyScanner also gives you options to find the cheapest days to travel in a month or even use a “Cheapest Month” option to show you which is the most price efficient month to travel to your destination. There are more tips and tricks you can use with SkyScanner to find the best destinations, routes, and prices as well, which is worth doing some Googling on.
Accommodations
Booking.com – I’ve found this a great way to easily find hotels and apartments alike throughout our travels. I like their map-search feature as well to compare locations of all the places I want to stay in. And their prices are transparent, so you usually don’t get blasted with a bunch of unknown fees (except when their are some weird local taxes sometimes). Still, it’s very easy to find exactly what you’re looking for with their search criteria, giving you the option to filter things out by price, amenities, location, type of place, cancellation policy, etc. My go-to first stop when booking a place.
Agoda – Very similar to Booking.com. I’ve found that it really shines in Asia, whereas I generally found less options with Booking.com there. In any case, another powerful tool. When I had a hotel stay get cancelled about two weeks before a trip (because the boutique hotel went under), they ended up helping us find another place PLUS gave us extra credits for the stay.
Travel Insurance
SafetyWing – This is one of our first stops when looking for travel insurance.
World Nomads – And this is right on up there with SafetyWing.
Cigna Global Health Insurance – Travel insurance is good for emergency evacuations, urgent care, and delayed luggages, but if you’re on some long-term traveling or doing the digital nomad thing, you need ACTUAL health insurance. Cigna has been great for us. They’ve covered all our claims so far with no issue (and we are not getting anything by recommending the service). They even cover mental healthcare therapy, so this is a great option if you’re traveling the globe like us to pretty much take care of all your concerns.
Packing & Gear
Backpacks & Luggage – Depending on the amount of traveling you’re doing and where you’re going, you’ll have different needs for your luggage. But we’ve got some pretty general recommendations that have worked for us. Basically, we keep a modular inventory of bags and cases ready to go for any length of traveling!
Yearlong Packing List – Or long-term traveling in general. Packing to live abroad as a digital nomad is a lot different than packing for a one-climate one- or two-week trip. See some of the recommendations and tips we’ve picked up from our long-term travel.
Traveling Carry On Only – Carry-on only is our preferred way to travel. We’ve been to Uganda and Japan, a honeymoon to Thailand and an adventure through Argentina, all sticking with carry on luggage. In fact, pretty much all our trips are carry on. It’s easier at the airport, quicker, and simplifies things in a lot of ways.
Getting Around
Google Maps – Goes without saying, if you need to know how to get somewhere, Google Maps has you covered. I highly recommend downloading offline maps of areas you’ll be traveling in case of service issues. It can also provide information on public transit, although we’ve found in less traveled places (such as Serbia) it might be lacking.
Rome2Rio – Rome2Rio is a fantastic way of figuring out how to get from point A to point B, whether it’s ferry, train, plane, or automobile. It’ll link you to places where you can get more information, tickets, or whatever else you might need.
RentalCars.com – This is like Booking.com or Agoda.com for me..
Experiences
GetYourGuide – A great resource for daytrips and tours. We’ve found this to be really nice for booking some experiences where a guide would be helpful or where we wanted to go visit a place, but needed a ride plus tickets for a place. The convenience factor is A-plus for us.
Viator – Again, very similar as Viator. Besides using these as places to book experiences, sometimes I like to just see what’s popular on them. For example, if you’re in Brasov, looking up something simple like “Brasov Day Trip” might spark a whole bunch of ideas of things and places you might want to do or visit.
AirBNB – I’ve really enjoyed using AirBNB experiences to find cool tour ideas beyond the typical GetYourGuide and Viator offerings. We’ve also met some cool people by doing experiences through her. For example, the individual who gave us our walking tour in Serbia ended up being someone I later went to a concert with. We’ve pretty much had all good experiences here.
Travel Credit Cards
Travel Credit Cards – We’re not experts when it comes to the credit card point-hacking game, but we’ve gotten more than our fair share of flights and upgrades for free. We can definitely recommend taking advantage of travel credit cards to earn points for free flights, companion passes so your partners, best friend or whoever flies with you free anywhere you go, get travel and car insurance for travels, and more. The benefits of using the right travel credits abroad are often even better than they appear. So we’ll go over some of the things we look for.