Owen Park
How to order your trip bookings to save money, increase flexibility and gain better travel quality. I have been planning too many trips and have found a general booking order that can help save time and stress when planning a trip.
Step 1: international flights first
First lock your international flights and then start to book the rest of your trip. Why lock your flights first? As a rule of thumb flight prices tend to decrease as the flight is farther away from the time of the flight. Therefore, as long as you are buying your flights 90-120 days in advance you will likely receive the lowest price for your flights. Many airline pricing systems operate on similar algorithms to reach similar prices for flights with similar parameters. The important thing to remember when locking your flights is that the flights frame the rest of your trip. This means that your flights determine your arrival city, your departure city, the dates you will be traveling, and your long-haul flight fatigue. In other words, after you lock your flights you will build your rest of your trip around them. This is in contrast to locking your flights last and then trying to fit the flights into the rest of your already framed trip. In general most travel guides fail to address this critical step of trip planning and it is key to getting the most out of your long-term travel.
Step 2: must-have reservations
Then, there are the reservations that sell out before you even get a chance to look at other options. The pattern for these is that they are usually popular restaurants and attractions within major cities. If you are doing the Inca Trail, you will find that permits for the different sections of the trail sell out within a couple of weeks. The same can be said for the blue lagoon in Iceland as well as geothermal pools. Some museums also offer timed entry, and can sell out before you even have a chance to look at other options for the day. As with the flights, for trips where these are key aspects of the experience, you will want to book these as early as possible – ideally within the first 14 days of planning your trip.
Step 3: first-3-nights accommodation
Lock the arrival city but not the rest of the trip. It’s useful to arrive in a place that you know, as you will be arriving late after a long-haul flight. However, it’s not useful to lock down the whole of your trip in advance of arrival, as you have not yet got your bearings and have no idea of the type of accommodation you would like to use on the rest of your trip. For most people, 3 nights is sufficient to find a place that you like to use as a base for the rest of your trip. Some trips however will have very tight itineraries or will involve specific events, in which case it may be better to lock down your accommodation for longer. Test this approach on your next trip.
When I spoke to a local guide about how he approached planning for his clients, his answers were not at all what I had read in every travel guide I had picked up off the shelf.
Step 4: internal transit if dates are inflexible
As for reserving internal travel, it is a good idea to reserve trains for flexible itineraries with flexible-priced tickets last (i.e. the same day or 1-7 weeks before departure) since those type of tickets do not decrease in price if booked in advance while fixed-priced tickets for specific dates often can be purchased at advance-purchase discounts if booked well in advance. High-speed trains, however, between major cities on popular routes do offer advance-purchase discounts at fixed-date rates. Same goes with flights on regional carriers that offer internal flights: it is best to book them within 14-30 days of your trip. That’s the rule that never fails for me.
Step 5: experiences and activities last
Other things can be booked late. On the road, tours, cooking classes, guided hikes and other experiences offered by local operators can be found and booked 7 to 14 days in advance for similar prices (sometimes even cheaper) than they would cost if booked from home through a middleman. There are two big exceptions to this rule. The first are climbing and other permit-controlled experiences that have limited space and typically fill up well in advance. The second are seasonal activities such as skiing, white-water rafting or whale-watching that occur for only a short period of time each year and typically sell out months in advance. For the other experiences, the worst that can happen is that you run out of energy to go on the hike, or that the weather turns against you and you have to skip the river-kayaking trip. As long as you’ve booked it close to the time of the experience itself, you can match up with the experience.
So, how can you use this information for planning your next trip?
Plan with a contingency line in mind throughout your planning process. Include one buffer day per week, have 40% or more of your bookings be refundable/cancellable, and put aside a small reserve of funds. If you have to then scramble to add in contingency in the middle of your trip, it will likely cost you a lot of money. Plan your trip out starting with a hard date and a set budget. The constraints that you have will shape your trip much more than the inspirational places that you wish to visit. Locking the biggest decisions first (such as flights and anchor accommodations as well as any reservations that are required for the experiences that you wish to have) will allow the middle of your trip to be loose and can then be changed as you travel to allow for serendipity to occur.
Closing perspective from years on the road
These are general patterns that tend to work for most people most of the time. There will be times when the pattern does not work for a particular person on a particular trip, and you will have to use your own best judgment in those situations. It is also a good idea to read many different resources, talk to many different people, and then test things out yourself. Only through experience can you really learn how to plan a trip, and the act of planning the trip is a big part of the learning process. By reading many different resources, you can shorten the time between making a mistake and realizing it. The biggest reward from long-term travel is the opportunity to have many different trips, and to have trips that you remember for years to come and that changed something about you.
This has been reviewed by Tara Singh. Crosschecked against the author’s own experiences.
Reviewed by Tara Singh. Trip planning data was cross-checked with a variety of primary sources including travel and airline websites, as well as official government websites that provide travel information. In addition, people that traveled recently to a variety of different destinations were interviewed. We have done our best to verify information regarding the cost of flights, hotel stays, as well as other travel related expenses. Prices for travel-related goods and services, as well as information regarding flights and itineraries, were cross-checked whenever possible before the information was published. Should you happen to come across any errors, or if you have some other feedback, please don’t hesitate to contact us using our Contact page. Information regarding our Editorial Standards as well as our Fact-Checking Policy can be found on this site as well.
