42 Travel Planning Tips & Tricks from Travel Pro Leigh Rowan

00:00:00.000 | Planning the perfect vacation can be a daunting task.

00:00:03.200 | But what if there was a secret to having an incredible trip every single time?

00:00:07.440 | Today, we're diving into the art of trip planning with an expert who's organized

00:00:11.760 | thousands of incredible vacations.

00:00:13.920 | We'll uncover whether you're actually choosing your trip or if your trip is choosing you,

00:00:17.840 | essential organization tips,

00:00:20.320 | and how to create an itinerary that guarantees an unforgettable experience.

00:00:24.960 | I'm Chris Hutchins, this is All The Hacks,

00:00:27.200 | and whether you're a meticulous planner or love spontaneous adventures,

00:00:30.800 | you will leave this episode ready to make your next vacation your best one yet.

00:00:34.720 | And big favor before we jump in is to give us a quick thumbs up to help others find this channel.

00:00:39.360 | And if you're new here and you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel,

00:00:43.280 | consider subscribing.

00:00:44.560 | What is the secret to having an incredible vacation?

00:00:49.040 | Look, I've planned thousands of vacations for hundreds of people,

00:00:51.840 | and I'll tell you that it all boils down to one thing.

00:00:55.360 | Is this trip choosing you or are you choosing this trip?

00:00:58.400 | And what do you mean by that?

00:01:00.400 | What I mean by that is how organized are you for the trip that you want to have?

00:01:04.080 | Is this something you've been dreaming about for years you've thought about?

00:01:07.120 | Or is this a spontaneous pop-up that maybe you didn't have planned for,

00:01:10.880 | but you're going to go on it anyway because the flight's worked out,

00:01:13.520 | or there's a great hotel, or you're going to stay with friends or

00:01:16.240 | whatever, and you're just going along for the ride?

00:01:18.320 | Are you in control?

00:01:19.600 | And have you planned this thing and you've been meticulous about it?

00:01:22.080 | Or are you deciding, "Oh, hey, this sounds fun. Let's go do this."

00:01:25.120 | When people set out to do something and they go accomplish that trip that they've been thinking

00:01:29.040 | about, dreaming about for years, whether it's a honeymoon or a bucket list trip or whatever,

00:01:33.680 | then it's incredible.

00:01:34.960 | But there's also this openness for spontaneity and the opportunity that comes with, "Oh, yeah,

00:01:39.520 | this sounds like this could be pretty cool. Let's do this too."

00:01:42.400 | And that can be an incredible pathway too.

00:01:44.720 | Now, look, both can be fraught with danger, and we'll talk today about

00:01:48.320 | some classic examples of where people fail in both those cases.

00:01:51.440 | But as long as your mindset is open to, "Yeah, let's go plan and do this thing we've been

00:01:56.160 | dreaming about for years," or, "Oh, hey, this popped up. This looks cool. Let's go do this,

00:01:59.920 | and let's be open to it," you'll have a great time.

00:02:02.400 | And so you have to know which one you're going into.

00:02:04.480 | Exactly. And know how to handle both scenarios,

00:02:07.840 | because there's obviously very different levels of planning involved with both.

00:02:11.120 | Okay. So I think let's start with someone who's trying to plan the trip, trying to be in control,

00:02:17.280 | but doesn't actually know what the trip is. Because the goal today is to walk people through,

00:02:22.000 | I don't know, like a masterclass on how to plan a trip all the way from the beginning of,

00:02:27.120 | "Where do I want to go?" to booking things, to planning things, and actually what you do when

00:02:32.080 | you're there and what you need to know before. So that's what I want to accomplish.

00:02:35.600 | Well, first, let's start with how are you organizing yourself? Because if you have

00:02:39.680 | that openness mindset to, "The world's my oyster. There's a blue sky out there.

00:02:43.360 | I can go see anything," you have to start with organization to make sure that all the

00:02:46.880 | things you do want to do are captured in the right place. So for a lot of our clients that

00:02:50.720 | are the online folks, they're working with a Google Sheet, or they're working with a spreadsheet of

00:02:55.360 | some sort where their travel inspiration lives. They're sending themselves emails,

00:02:59.200 | they're tagging it in their inbox. Maybe they're saving things on Instagram or Pinterest or

00:03:04.320 | somewhere digitally that they can go back and reference and say, "Hey, this looks like a cool

00:03:08.560 | destination," or, "Hey, let's add this to our list." What we do with our clients is we check

00:03:13.200 | in with them on a quarterly basis. We say, "Hey, every 90 days, what else is on that list that we

00:03:16.880 | should be aware of?" Or, "What's popped up that's been inspiring to you?" Maybe your friends have

00:03:20.800 | been. Maybe you've seen it in a magazine that you're really excited about. For the analog people,

00:03:25.840 | people who are not so online, maybe they're a little older or older school, or maybe they just

00:03:29.840 | love to journal, we actually have a written list that folks will keep and keep prizing us of and

00:03:36.480 | letting us know, "Yeah, this is now on my list," or, "This is something exciting."

00:03:39.920 | So it first starts with organization. Writing down and keeping your inspirations in one place

00:03:44.560 | that you can reference, super important. Later on, we're chatting about something that I think is

00:03:50.160 | very important around organization, which is checking in with your organizational list,

00:03:53.920 | making sure that you're doing the things you want to do, that you've set out to do,

00:03:56.960 | and cross-referencing them, and then keeping notes on what you've done.

00:04:00.000 | So I think if you can be digitally inclined and do things in Google Spreadsheets and set up your

00:04:06.640 | right digital organization to capture all of your inspiration and all of your notes,

00:04:11.280 | you're going to be great. Okay. But what if that organization

00:04:15.120 | expands so much? So I imagine there are people listening. They're like, "Okay. I saw a cool

00:04:19.760 | Instagram video about Japan. I want to go there. The Olympics are happening in Paris. I want to

00:04:24.320 | go there." And then all of a sudden, they've got a thousand things on their list. How do they start

00:04:28.240 | to think about, "Where should I take this next trip?" Or, "I've got some vacation this year.

00:04:33.440 | Where should I go now?" Yeah. Great questions. So first,

00:04:37.120 | check in with yourself. What is that really inspiring, exciting trip for you and why?

00:04:42.880 | And write down the qualities of it, right? Olympics. I've always wanted to go to a major

00:04:47.120 | sporting event. I want to be where the people are. I want to do something really exciting.

00:04:51.200 | Those characteristics of that trip, where the people are, exciting, sporting, those things

00:04:56.960 | are valuable and important to you. And maybe you look at Japan and you say, "Oh, I've always wanted

00:05:01.200 | to go to a cultural place with history and a deep connection to self," right? You circle those words

00:05:06.960 | and you say, "Okay. For this trip, I'm looking for more activity. So maybe I won't go to Japan now

00:05:13.200 | because I don't want to have the introspective, quiet, slower trip. I want to have the fast-paced,

00:05:18.800 | loud Paris trip for the Olympics." And so that's what decides you on this one. It doesn't mean

00:05:22.800 | you have to get rid of Japan altogether or say that any destination that would be introspective

00:05:26.880 | or slow isn't exciting for you. Instead, it's that, "Okay, this trip, this time is this experience.

00:05:32.720 | And I know I can come back to this list and look for inspiration and the qualities I want for my

00:05:37.040 | next trip." Also, it's interesting to see as you gather all these destinations and you get all this

00:05:42.960 | inspiration, what is it that really does motivate you to travel and why, right? It's a nice check-in

00:05:48.320 | and this is why I recommend people do this on a 90-day, on a quarterly basis. But why do these

00:05:52.880 | destinations matter to you, right? What are the things you're seeing online, whether it's an

00:05:56.960 | Instagram or Pinterest or wherever your inspiration is, that's motivating you to say, "Hey, I want to

00:06:01.760 | go to this destination." And what does that mean for you? What's alive in you, right? When we plan

00:06:06.960 | trips for people, there are so many different levers or so many different reasons people are

00:06:11.520 | going to different destinations. And it could be the same destination but three different trips

00:06:16.640 | because they're going with different people, they're taking their kids, they're taking their

00:06:19.600 | parents, they're traveling to eat this time, next time they're going on a spa relaxation time where

00:06:24.880 | they don't want to eat at all. Who knows? So, it's interesting to see how those themes pop up

00:06:30.080 | for people. So, let's say someone's done some thinking about what kind of trip they want. They

00:06:34.480 | say, "I want a little bit of culture, but I want to do it a little bit slower. I need a relaxation.

00:06:39.440 | I want to get away from work. So, I don't want it to be too high-paced." Lots of places out there,

00:06:46.240 | maybe they haven't set up this inspiration for years. Where can they go to start to get

00:06:50.720 | inspiration and how do they narrow the list down? Great question. So, the first thing is,

00:06:55.360 | talk to your friends. Talk to your social circle and see who's been places that might match those

00:07:00.240 | characteristics you're looking for. Get their feedback. What do they love? What do they not

00:07:03.840 | love? How do they do it? How do they plan it? Get an understanding of what has worked for other

00:07:08.320 | people that you know because you've got a great filter in knowing them. That's going to work for

00:07:12.160 | you. Second is, look at places like magazines, blogs, articles recently, and local papers,

00:07:18.400 | whatever it is that fit your style and see where the inspiration lies for you with them. Again,

00:07:24.160 | I love reading Rod Report or Travel and Leisure. Not all those destinations,

00:07:29.120 | not all those experiences they talk about match my style. So, I have a filter when I look at those

00:07:33.760 | media outlets to know that, okay, I'm learning here, but I'm not also applying every bit of

00:07:40.080 | knowledge to my own life. With those two filters and with friends, with media, and with online

00:07:47.200 | inspiration as well, and do be careful online because there's so much out there that you can

00:07:52.960 | learn about from blogs, from newsletters, from ChatGPT, which we'll talk about, that we have

00:07:59.680 | to take all that with a grain of salt. If you've been reading a blog for years and you know the

00:08:03.840 | style and the preferences of that traveler, then great. Apply that filter as well. But if not,

00:08:09.760 | maybe you want to be a little bit wary because you might be reading someone's experience,

00:08:13.520 | maybe they were paid to go there, maybe there's something else happening on the back end that

00:08:17.920 | you don't know about, and it might be tainting your kind of perspective trip. So, I say when

00:08:25.280 | you're reading media that you're not comfortable with or not familiar with, take it with a grain

00:08:30.640 | of salt because it's good for inspiration, good for fact-checking, but maybe not good for being

00:08:36.080 | the sole source of inspiration for you. So, with those filters, take a look back at your lists and

00:08:41.280 | the qualities that you're looking for for this trip and come up with a couple of concentric

00:08:45.520 | circles, right? This destination has the qualities I'm looking for, people I know, media I've read,

00:08:51.600 | talked about why this would work well for me. Great. Now I've got a destination, let me start

00:08:56.000 | planning. Let me start building some scaffolding around this trip and test it and see, is this the

00:09:00.080 | trip that I want to have? A couple of things you didn't mention that I'll flag that we've done. So,

00:09:04.320 | one, I really like the New York Times 52 places list. It's great. There's a couple publications

00:09:11.600 | that do an annual kind of inspiration gathering thing. If you're going to go somewhere this year,

00:09:16.480 | here are some great places. I like that for inspiration. If you have a region in mind,

00:09:21.360 | I think the first 20 pages of any Lonely Planet guide, they have the top 20 experiences or 30

00:09:28.560 | experiences or 15 experiences. And so, sometimes if you're like, "Oh, I'm thinking of going to

00:09:32.000 | Southeast Asia," go get the Lonely Planet Southeast Asia. And by the way, you don't

00:09:35.920 | have to buy it. Oftentimes, those pages are in the preview on Amazon before you buy it.

00:09:40.320 | A lot of libraries let you have access to downloadable eBooks for free. So, that's one

00:09:45.280 | way I've gathered inspiration that we didn't mention. And the other is thinking about seasonality.

00:09:51.120 | So, you mentioned what kind of trip do you want, the intersection of where might be fun.

00:09:56.640 | So, maybe you decide that a Caribbean vacation is for you, but the only time you have off is in

00:10:04.320 | August. Right. North American summer in the Caribbean. Sounds like a dream. Yeah. So,

00:10:08.640 | how do you think about weather and seasonality when it comes to some of these things and going

00:10:14.720 | during the time when it's best or going during the time where it's maybe on the shoulder season?

00:10:19.920 | Yeah. Well, that comes back to the idea of, is this vacation choosing you or are you choosing

00:10:23.920 | it? Seasonality really plays very heavily into this. Sometimes we're time-bound by school years

00:10:29.600 | and other vacations where we really can't take off in that season that would be ideal to go in.

00:10:34.880 | And sometimes, actually, we want to be traveling in shoulder seasons because pricing is lower,

00:10:40.560 | experiences might be more accessible, there might be just fewer people, and it might be better.

00:10:44.800 | So, two things that I will chat about. One is those 52 lists, the top list,

00:10:52.320 | top 20 this year, whatever, are great lists to help you discover a destination to reinforce

00:10:56.880 | questions or ideas you might have around an inspiration. They're also very good at driving

00:11:01.760 | people this year and next year. So, if you find something that's really good on that list,

00:11:06.240 | maybe you might want to put it on your list for three years down the road. Let people come in,

00:11:11.360 | kind of cycle through, and then you can go check it out because it might be a little quieter

00:11:15.520 | seasonally to go two years later than it is to go this year or go next.

00:11:21.120 | When it comes to seasonality, I tend to think that shoulder seasons are the best times to go

00:11:25.600 | places because A, fewer people, B, lower pricing, and C, you get sometimes even better weather or

00:11:30.880 | better experiences without having to deal with all the madness. Case in point, the Amalfi Coast.

00:11:36.640 | As you've probably heard me say on this podcast before, I love Italy, I've been there so many

00:11:41.600 | times. I love the Amalfi Coast. It's truly incredible, but in July and August, it's a zoo.

00:11:47.040 | It's crazy. In fact, it's so busy and nuts that many local Amalfitani leave the coast and go

00:11:54.640 | elsewhere and come back in September because it's just so overwhelming. So, you should do that too.

00:12:00.000 | You should come back in September. Now, granted, if you've got a school schedule where you've got

00:12:04.160 | to be back in school August 20th and you have to be in Amalfi that summer, well, maybe you go in

00:12:10.320 | May. Another great shoulder season when crowds are a little slower and a little quieter, still busy,

00:12:16.800 | but great time to go. But September, October, perfect. Perfecto. Same thing in Rwanda. We were

00:12:23.120 | just in Rwanda in March. Traditionally, it's not a space or time of year to go because it's a lot

00:12:28.800 | rainier than the rest of the year, but for us, it was perfect. We were one of very few people

00:12:33.520 | out on the gorilla tracks those days and we had the gorillas all to ourselves. It just felt so

00:12:38.240 | magical to be in those misty mountains. Yes, there was rain, no doubt, but it was just us and the

00:12:43.200 | gorillas and the experience was much different than people I know who had been three weeks prior

00:12:49.200 | in February when they had hot, bright, sunny days and it was a zoo.

00:12:52.400 | Also, pricing was a lot cheaper. Just going into March, we were actually able to save about half

00:12:59.040 | of the money we would have spent on permits for February just because of a seasonality program

00:13:04.320 | that the Rwandan government has. So, as you research these destinations and you look at

00:13:08.480 | seasonality and timing, think about where am I flexible and could I go a month later, a month

00:13:14.320 | earlier? Maybe I change the weather a little bit. I change the logistics a little bit,

00:13:18.560 | but I get a little bit better of an experience, maybe a lower price, maybe fewer people.

00:13:23.760 | I like it. So, I put together a notion table where we put all the destinations that we wanted to go.

00:13:27.840 | So, I filled them out. My wife, Amy, filled them out and we had a bunch of columns and I went in

00:13:32.960 | and I actually, with the help of Chat GPT, was kind of like, "Here's 20 places. Help me figure

00:13:38.240 | out when the prime season is for weather." Love it.

00:13:40.560 | "Figure out the shoulder season." And we tagged, "Here are the seasons that are good for this

00:13:44.640 | place." And then she and I each ranked the destinations one to five.

00:13:48.640 | Love your organization. I hope you'll share this in the notes here today.

00:13:52.240 | Yeah. And then we had an average. So, now when we wanted to take a trip, we're like, "Oh,

00:13:56.880 | we're going to think about where to go in the summer." Well, we already looked at the

00:14:00.160 | 30 or 40 places we want to go. Let's look at those places, filter by summer,

00:14:05.040 | sort by average rating for Amy and I. Love it.

00:14:07.600 | And we have some sense of some inspiration. So, that's where we're collecting our inspiration.

00:14:11.600 | And people always ask on the show like, "Oh, you talk about notion a lot. How do you use it?"

00:14:15.840 | That's one example of building a table that we can add to. And then each item in a table,

00:14:22.000 | this is where I think Google Sheets lets down and a database wins, is that each item in that table

00:14:28.160 | might be called Italy or might be called the Amalfi Coast or Sweden. And then each item is a

00:14:33.280 | page. So, you can open that Sweden page. And go in-depth there.

00:14:35.680 | And start clipping things to it and clipping things.

00:14:37.440 | Totally. And if you use... There's a couple of

00:14:39.520 | notion bookmarklet tools or browser extensions. "Oh, here's a cool article. Send it there. Here's

00:14:44.160 | something. Send it here." And you start to gather all your ideas on an Italy page or a Sweden page,

00:14:49.360 | but that page is actually just part of a database of inspiration.

00:14:52.800 | I love that. And let me add a couple other bits to that too, right? You can add additional

00:14:56.640 | filters on top of that because Amalfi might be great for you and Amy just by yourselves.

00:15:01.120 | But when you add in a couple of young toddlers or you add in older people,

00:15:04.960 | it may not be the great multi-generational destination you want it to be, right? So,

00:15:09.680 | you could say, "Here's a filter for kids. Here's a filter for my parents. Here's a filter for all

00:15:13.280 | of us together." Again, taking that same idea and other filters, what about how crowded you

00:15:19.600 | want things to be, right? If everybody else finds that it's a 4.5 to go to Amalfi in October,

00:15:25.200 | maybe you guys go in February and you're not going to the beach, you're not going on the water,

00:15:30.320 | but you're getting the true essence and the character of those towns because that's what

00:15:32.960 | you're looking for, right? So, those filters are really, really important.

00:15:36.080 | One other item that I would call out is that you guys have gotten way advanced at this,

00:15:42.000 | which I love, but check in with yourselves on that list. Right now, Japan might be super hot

00:15:48.960 | for you because everybody else has been there and all of your friends have been talking about it,

00:15:51.920 | and maybe you're really hunkering to go back, but maybe in a year Japan's lost its luster and

00:15:56.240 | Malaysia's the new thing for you. I don't know. Check in on it every quarter and see, "Is this

00:16:00.400 | rating still true to me and do I really want to do this?" It takes five minutes, but it just helps

00:16:04.480 | you guys check in with, "Okay, should a pop-up trip become available and now I can go here,

00:16:09.040 | do we actually want to do this?" Right? The last thing we'll say is chat GPT.

00:16:12.960 | Big fan of accessible information at our fingertips. Double-check the validity of that

00:16:19.520 | information as often as possible. Maybe they said that March was a great season to go to Rwanda

00:16:24.640 | because the weather's not that bad. Yeah, the weather wasn't that bad, but the weather definitely

00:16:29.520 | was not as good as February or as good as June. You really want to double-check that

00:16:35.280 | what data you're getting out is actually valid for the purposes you want. We were looking at it a

00:16:42.000 | couple of weeks ago and said, "What are the best things people should do in Paris this summer for

00:16:45.600 | the Olympics?" They said, "Go inside Notre Dame." I was like, "Whoa, I'd love to do that too, but

00:16:50.240 | it's still under construction from the fire." Why are we getting this hallucination kind of data?

00:16:55.920 | Can you really validate everything you're getting from chat GPT?

00:17:01.200 | Or whatever AI tool you want to use. A couple of tips there. One, I tried to get specific data

00:17:08.640 | instead of opinion. Instead of saying, "Where should we go with good weather?" I said,

00:17:14.640 | "Can you give me the average highs and lows for these cities in this month?" Or, "What is the

00:17:20.720 | percent chance of rain in this month?" But still, we have this trip to Europe planned in the summer

00:17:27.360 | and we have no actual agenda. We just have flights. We'll get to that right after this about

00:17:32.160 | when the trip finds you. I said, "Where could we go that doesn't get warmer than 85?" We don't want

00:17:39.840 | to go somewhere where it's 90s in the summer. Humid and you're suffering.

00:17:43.200 | Yeah. It might be fun for kids. And they

00:17:44.640 | came up with all these destinations. And then I was like, "What about Portugal?" And they're like,

00:17:48.400 | "Oh, that would be a great idea." But it's not a human. So I'm like, "Why did you put it on the

00:17:51.520 | list?" And they're like, "Oh, sorry. I'll add it now." And so sometimes I've found myself just

00:17:56.560 | asking after every response, "Are there any places you forgot about?" And unfortunately,

00:18:02.720 | 90% of the time, it's like, "Well, yeah, here are three more." So you're right. You can't trust it.

00:18:07.520 | However, I go back to people I know that don't fall into this optimizer's curse, which I do,

00:18:13.760 | and maybe you do a little bit less, which is they're like, "Oh, we want to take a trip.

00:18:18.000 | Let's just go to Italy." They don't try to pick the best trip. And so I like timeboxing this,

00:18:24.240 | and it's something that we're working on. And I won't say we do a perfect job at it,

00:18:28.480 | but the idea being, "Okay, we're going to take a trip. And this week, we're going to figure out

00:18:32.960 | where we're going." And you know what? We have a lot of years and a lot of trips ahead of us.

00:18:37.280 | But this one doesn't have to be the only one. And a friend of mine actually took a trip to,

00:18:41.760 | I think, Australia. And they'd always said, "We can't go to Australia because we need two weeks.

00:18:45.040 | We need two weeks." And then finally, they're like, "Well, we have one week." They found a

00:18:47.840 | deal. They went. And they're like, "Yo, we can always go back if we need two weeks."

00:18:50.480 | Yeah. Totally.

00:18:50.960 | And so every trip will be great if you aren't too stressed out planning it.

00:18:56.720 | Agreed.

00:18:57.200 | And I think sometimes we fall into that boat. In many cases, this trip is that

00:19:02.240 | because I think kids add this X factor where one day, your kids are super well-behaved,

00:19:08.080 | and you're like, "You know what? We should take them on this trip." And then the next day,

00:19:10.640 | you're like, "The kids are monsters." And you're like, "Are we biting off too much?"

00:19:15.040 | So if the trip found you, and you know where you're going because you've got these great flight

00:19:20.320 | deals, or if you've used one of these flight discovery tools we talked about to find this

00:19:24.400 | amazing idea, that's one case. The other case is you've decided where you're going,

00:19:28.480 | and you need to book the flight. And at the end of both of those scenarios,

00:19:32.400 | we're ready to start planning. So any quick tips on the, "I know where I want to go. I'm

00:19:37.440 | being intentional. I've got to book the flights that maybe we haven't covered before." Flights

00:19:41.440 | for my trip that I've decided is in Italy or is somewhere.

00:19:44.960 | Yeah. Or sometimes there's a connection where maybe they'll have... In your connecting flight,

00:19:51.360 | they'll change the flight times. And now you have too short or too long of a connection

00:19:55.440 | or schedule change of any other sort, keep monitoring them. And what you can do is sign

00:19:59.440 | up for alerts from the airline to make sure that they notify you for every change that happens to

00:20:04.400 | your flight. But also you can use monitoring tools that are out there. TripIt has some of them.

00:20:08.640 | Other tools have these automatic monitoring to make sure that you're getting the right flights

00:20:13.440 | and that changes don't occur. In terms of how else to book,

00:20:18.080 | I would always keep an eye on optimizing your flights to see if maybe the price you've paid

00:20:22.000 | does drop. With points and miles in particular, you can usually get a rebate back of whatever the

00:20:27.280 | flight difference is. You were very lucky this summer. I think you've booked flights for 45,000

00:20:31.440 | miles per person. That's incredible. You're probably not going to optimize around that.

00:20:35.440 | But if you'd booked them for 120,000 and maybe flights on the same day had dropped to 45,

00:20:40.240 | you'd be getting that huge chunk of miles back. So you do want to keep searching or

00:20:44.160 | keep monitoring automatically with tools to see if there's an advantage to take there.

00:20:48.560 | Yeah. And sometimes the same thing's true with fares. So TripIt's great as a monitoring tool.

00:20:52.720 | It'll say, "Hey, the flight you booked has gone down in price. You should go rebook it."

00:20:56.000 | And then you can. Exactly.

00:20:57.680 | And yes, now I might get a credit on whatever airline that was. And who knows how easy that

00:21:02.880 | credit will be to use. But it was free to get the credit. So might as well keep track. And we'll

00:21:06.880 | talk a little bit about organizing everything on a trip as we go. Any advice? This is a question

00:21:12.800 | from a listener who said, "When I'm planning these big trips, how do I think about layovers?

00:21:18.240 | And do I think about them differently than if I'm flying domestically and I have a sense of

00:21:22.720 | how travel works?" Yeah, that's a great question. So generally speaking, when you're flying from

00:21:26.800 | the States to Europe or to Asia, you're flying on the first segment on a very long-haul flight

00:21:31.440 | to a hub in that continent. And then from there, you're going to connect onwards.

00:21:35.280 | So what's nice about landing in a hub is that if, God forbid, you did miss your connection because

00:21:40.160 | your inbound flight was delayed, generally speaking, from hub to endpoint, there are

00:21:44.480 | other flights that are out there. Awesome. What you may want to do when you've booked your flight

00:21:49.600 | is just double-check, okay, what would be the next flight if, for some reason, we were delayed by an

00:21:54.240 | hour and a half, we miss our two-hour connection, right? What's the next flight from Frankfurt

00:21:59.040 | onwards to Vienna, right? And then you can kind of have a sense for how many more flights there

00:22:04.080 | are that day or if you're going to end up sleeping in the Frankfurt airport that night.

00:22:07.040 | Now, what I always like to do whenever I go into Europe or Asia, for this matter, is I like to have

00:22:12.880 | at least a two-hour layover. Why two hours? Because you're going to end up most likely having

00:22:17.360 | a clear immigration and you'll have probably to go through security again. Most European airports,

00:22:23.360 | a lot of Asian ones too, require another layer of security. And that's security without pre,

00:22:29.200 | without clear, whatever you're used to in an American security system, out the window.

00:22:34.080 | Out the window. So get used to that. And also, you're going to be groggy. You may not have slept

00:22:38.640 | the last 10 hours. Your kids might be super grumpy. It's a bit of an experience. So don't make it too

00:22:43.680 | rushed for yourself. On the flip side, maybe you do want to pack in a really long layover. Maybe

00:22:48.800 | you want to spend eight hours in the Frankfurt area, not necessarily airport. What I would do

00:22:54.080 | in that case is leave my bags at the airport. There's a left luggage sort of compartment desk.

00:22:59.840 | When you do pass through customs, you can leave your luggage there, your carry-on luggage,

00:23:05.120 | and then you can go explore the city and come back. And so last summer, our family flew to Europe and

00:23:09.200 | we actually did just that. We left our bags at the sort of checked baggage area in the Frankfurt

00:23:15.040 | airport, took the train, the U-Bahn into town, hung out, had a great little tour by ourselves

00:23:20.320 | of different districts of Frankfurt, had a wonderful meal, came back to the airport in time,

00:23:25.520 | got on our next flight. And so I would highly recommend that if you do have longer than let's

00:23:29.280 | say a four or five hour layover, take a look at what's in that area. Can you get into that town?

00:23:33.760 | Can you go explore before coming back to the airport and connecting onwards?

00:23:37.120 | The other thing you can do too if you have the budget for it and it's of interest is get a

00:23:41.360 | greeter. Oftentimes there are connection greeters. Amsterdam Schiphol airport, great example of this,

00:23:46.880 | it's only like 160 bucks to get a greeter. I think it goes up per person from there,

00:23:51.600 | not too much though. And that greeter will take you from your origination gate to your departing

00:23:55.440 | gate through all the formalities, security, whatever. There's a lounge, they'll give you

00:23:59.760 | access to that lounge as well. And it's a great way of taking what would be normally a stressful

00:24:04.720 | time and making it as stress-free as possible. So whatever you can do to make those layovers count,

00:24:11.200 | I would do it, but I wouldn't just disregard them. When you book your ticket, be intentional,

00:24:15.440 | check your backups, take a look at if you can extend your layover and make an experience out

00:24:19.920 | of it. Oftentimes, by the way, airlines will let you extend a layover up to about 24 hours without

00:24:25.440 | actually repricing your ticket. And some airlines, if you're flying through their hub, like if you're

00:24:30.800 | flying Emirates through Dubai or flying Iceland air through Reykjavik. Or Turkish through Istanbul.

00:24:35.360 | They'll let you stay for days at a time without any extra fees. Might only be 24 hours, but it

00:24:39.440 | could be two or three days. Absolutely. And in those cases, by the way, it is useful to see,

00:24:43.280 | do I need a visa to enter the country even temporarily? In the case of Turkey, yes,

00:24:47.600 | but you'll go and experience something that you weren't counting on doing. If you're using Turkish

00:24:52.720 | to get from the States down to North Africa, well, all of a sudden now you have a great time

00:24:56.880 | spending 12 hours in Turkey. It's pretty awesome. It's a bonus.

00:25:00.000 | Let's say the layover is pretty short and you don't see any other flights the rest of the day

00:25:04.800 | on the airline that you're flying or any of their partners, but you do see some cheap flights on

00:25:09.760 | other airlines that maybe are cheap now, three months out, six months out, but are probably not

00:25:14.800 | going to be cheap day of. Do you factor that in at all? Or are you only looking for other flights

00:25:20.880 | that day on the carrier you're flying? That's a great question. The unfortunate part is carriers

00:25:27.200 | who would then be responsible for rebooking you should there be a big delay. If they don't work

00:25:32.160 | with the other carriers, they don't care that there's other flights. Even though there are

00:25:36.240 | flights from Istanbul to wherever you might be going on other airlines that are not Turkish,

00:25:40.400 | if you flew Turkish into Istanbul and they were responsible for your delay,

00:25:43.440 | you're spending the night on Turkish time till the next day. You could, if you're just carrying on,

00:25:50.560 | you could risk buying your own last minute ticket and flying outbound and then maybe working with

00:25:55.360 | your credit card company later on to see if they'll reimburse for some of that, but Turkish won't.

00:25:58.960 | Turkish would not do that at all, actually. Unfortunately, if it's a different carrier,

00:26:05.760 | they may not care. You may be able to get somebody at the Istanbul airline counter,

00:26:12.240 | the transfer desk, who would look upon you humanely and say, "Oh, you were just carrying

00:26:16.560 | on a bag and you're missing a wedding. We'll get you there," but I wouldn't always count on it.

00:26:21.920 | It is helpful to look at that research ahead of time and know that you might be risking it a little

00:26:26.960 | bit. Maybe build in an extra bit of time if you can, a day on either side so that it's not like

00:26:32.640 | you're taking the last flight in and the first flight out. Yeah. One other option. If you're

00:26:37.680 | looking at these flights and there's three Lufthansa flights from Frankfurt to Amsterdam,

00:26:42.640 | wherever you're going, maybe you're fine. If there's not, maybe you add a little more buffer.

00:26:46.880 | If you can't add a little more buffer, maybe that's where a greeter comes in to help make

00:26:50.640 | sure that goes smoothly. Absolutely.

00:26:52.080 | If there are flights on another airline and it's not a discount airline that's not part

00:26:57.760 | of some airline alliance you can use points with, it's surprising that in some regions,

00:27:04.320 | the short regional flights can be very, very inexpensive. Yeah.

00:27:08.560 | If you book those through a program with free cancellation, even better if it's a program you

00:27:12.880 | already have points on. Maybe if there is a really important thing and you're flying on Air France

00:27:18.160 | and you're flying through Paris and you're worried you're going to miss that connection to, let's say,

00:27:22.400 | Frankfurt or Munich, you could see if you can use United Points to book that flight later in the day

00:27:28.880 | knowing that you could cancel before, but it's really important to understand the cancellation

00:27:32.880 | rules. I will link to a post that someone else, not me, has written about all these cancellation

00:27:37.440 | rules because some airlines you can cancel 10 minutes before and some you cancel 24 hours before,

00:27:42.640 | but I think that's a decent option. Yeah.

00:27:46.240 | The little hack here, though, is obviously if you're too late and you miss both those

00:27:51.440 | flights in air and you can't cancel it, that's a problem. I would say find someone on the ground.

00:27:56.640 | Who can help you out. Give them your record, locator, itinerary number and say, "Hey,

00:27:59.760 | if you haven't heard from me before this plane takes off, just cancel it for me so I get my

00:28:03.840 | points back." Right. Well, the one other thing I'll call out there, too, is make sure you don't

00:28:08.160 | double book yourself on the same airline because if you have an Air France connecting flight from

00:28:12.160 | Paris and you book yourself a later flight from Paris on Air France or on KLM, they will cancel

00:28:17.840 | that flight for you because they see you as double booked and they don't want to do that.

00:28:21.120 | They don't want to have a double booked passenger. So be creative, but not too creative.

00:28:25.440 | Yes. Although I currently am double booked on a United flight, but one is booked through United

00:28:31.920 | and one is booked through Air Canada. And I did not put the same frequent flyer number in,

00:28:38.400 | but I did put the same birthday and they have not canceled either. So...

00:28:41.680 | Fingers crossed. I'm not... I knew there would be a risk doing this. So if I do get canceled,

00:28:47.680 | no one should feel... It's on you.

00:28:48.960 | It's on me, but that sometimes works. Okay. So, all right. We've got some flight tips.

00:28:54.960 | We figured out where we're going. For all intents and purposes, we now have a plan to where we're

00:28:59.680 | going for this trip. Let's talk a little bit about the itinerary because before you could go to book

00:29:05.760 | hotels, let's say you decided it is a summer vacation in France, you need to figure out where

00:29:11.520 | to go. Do you have a general rule of thumb on how many days to think about spending in a place?

00:29:17.840 | If you have two weeks, is that one destination, two, three, four? Is there a minimum?

00:29:23.680 | Well, Chris, I appreciate you asking that because so many people have this idea that they're going

00:29:28.640 | to go on a two-week holiday in Europe and they're going to see 16 things. And this has been their

00:29:33.760 | mindset, their vision for so long. They're going to go see all of Europe in two weeks. And I'm like,

00:29:38.480 | "Guys, you're going to be day three exhausted and you're going to hate yourself for having done

00:29:42.240 | this. So please don't do that." So I think it's really important to temper your expectations with

00:29:48.240 | the realism of what feels great. What is too much? What is just enough? Taking that and applying it

00:29:56.160 | to an actual real trip, we like to build a scaffolding for people. They have their flight

00:30:00.640 | in, their flight out. We know what their big purpose of going on this trip is. It's relaxation,

00:30:06.640 | it's seeing the sights, it's eating these meals, it's going to a Taylor Swift concert.

00:30:10.400 | And then we put that centerpiece, that capstone somewhere in that trip. Everything else around

00:30:15.920 | that, we ask a few questions. How much activity and motion do you want to have? How many different

00:30:22.160 | things each day do you want to be doing? If you had to cut all of this out and just focus on one

00:30:29.360 | thing, what's the thing that matters the most? So as you look at this trip scaffolding and you

00:30:33.760 | figure out the amount of activity and the motion that you want to have, you then can start to slot

00:30:39.040 | in, "Okay, well, maybe I've been to Paris before. I've spent five days there in the past. Maybe I

00:30:44.320 | just need three days this time. And I'm okay splitting it up to do two days upon arrival

00:30:48.960 | and one day before departure so that I can get my bearings set when I land and I can

00:30:54.000 | feel back into Paris. But then as soon as I'm set, I can scoot off and go somewhere else,

00:31:00.000 | do the thing I want to do, come back to Paris the night before my flight to make sure that I'm not

00:31:05.280 | going to be freaking out about a 9 a.m. departure from Paris when I'm still two hours outside of

00:31:09.200 | town on the last day." So maybe that's the way that you feel like the motion and the movement

00:31:14.080 | could be right. But I like to have people draw this out on a piece of paper. "These are the days

00:31:19.840 | I'm in town. These are what I'm doing. This is the amount of motion. Does this feel right?"

00:31:23.760 | And ask themselves those questions. "Hey, I'm going to be spending three hours on the train

00:31:27.280 | this day. Do I really want to have a museum the moment I arrive and then go to a nice three

00:31:32.800 | Michelin star dinner?" That's a lot in one day. Maybe we chunk that out and now instead of

00:31:38.560 | spending two days in town, you're spending three because the next day you'll go to the museum and

00:31:43.200 | the final night you're there, you'll do the big Michelin star meal. So when people can see things

00:31:49.040 | visually, I think it really helps them. Adding things to a digital calendar, very important.

00:31:53.600 | Putting it on a spreadsheet, day by day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, what are my activities,

00:31:57.680 | where am I going, super helpful. But scaffolding it out so that people know how much motion and

00:32:04.000 | activity, that matters the most. Yeah, when we look at itineraries, we do something similar.

00:32:09.120 | And I think you often forget how much packing and traveling adds to the day. So you might be

00:32:16.160 | thinking, "Oh, we're just going from Paris to London. It's a short train ride." But that whole

00:32:21.200 | day is probably pretty close to written off because you wake up and you're like, "Well,

00:32:24.560 | now I want to make sure I'm all packed." And maybe this is different if you're a solo traveler and

00:32:29.680 | you just have a backpack. But when we have two kids, that day's gone. And so I try to make sure

00:32:36.560 | we're in each place for at least three nights. Because otherwise, as soon as you get there,

00:32:41.200 | you're starting to think about, "Now we got to go to this next place." And depending on the density

00:32:47.360 | of a destination, or how easy transportation is, might dictate whether you're taking on too much

00:32:55.280 | or not. In a place like Japan, where you could hop on a train and be somewhere. Or Europe,

00:32:59.760 | within a country, that's often true. Great. In a place where you've got to drive an hour to get to

00:33:04.880 | an airport, and then land, and then drive another. It could just feel like two destinations in two

00:33:10.800 | weeks is the max. Yeah. And honestly, if you're in Paris, it doesn't mean you can't take a day

00:33:18.240 | trip up to Normandy while you're there, right? Or you can't go out to Champagne for the afternoon.

00:33:22.160 | It's a long day, a long afternoon, but you can do those things, right? And still return back

00:33:26.240 | to Paris and have a base there. You don't need to pick up and move every two days or three days.

00:33:30.480 | And I think that's a common misconception for a lot of, especially North American travelers,

00:33:34.400 | is that if they have their two week vacation every year, and this is it, they got to pack it all in,

00:33:38.880 | they got to see everything. Scaffold your trip out, put it all out there and say,

00:33:43.280 | "What does seeing everything actually look like?" And then come back to me and we'll talk.

00:33:46.640 | Yeah. And I've never actually been someone that's tried this, but let's say you rent an Airbnb in

00:33:51.520 | Paris for a week, or in Tokyo. You could choose anywhere in the world, it doesn't matter. And

00:33:56.320 | you've got this place for a week, or even two weeks. The savings you probably get booking

00:34:01.520 | something for that long probably would afford you the ability to even do a little overnight

00:34:07.280 | someplace. Totally.

00:34:08.160 | So you could leave all the bags for your two week vacation in that place, pack a little overnight

00:34:13.840 | bag. Maybe more work with kids than not, but it could be a way to see a place that's maybe a

00:34:20.240 | little too far for a day trip, but not feel like you're having to pack it all up and move. And I

00:34:26.320 | know people have done this, we have not done this, but it's something that I think might be in the

00:34:31.040 | future, especially when kids are out of diapers, able to carry their own bags, not sleeping in

00:34:36.400 | cribs. Yeah. We do this all the time ourselves, and we do it for our clients obviously too,

00:34:40.080 | where you have a home base and then you explore for that night or two nights even. I'm going to

00:34:43.840 | be in Europe later this summer and we're going to take a 48 hour trip from our rented apartment up

00:34:49.040 | to Switzerland and then we'll come back. And it's great to be able to literally take a backpack

00:34:53.920 | with us and that's it. You have everything you need contained for the next 48 hours in that

00:34:58.000 | backpack. And you don't have to worry about schlepping everything, unpacking, repacking,

00:35:01.600 | ah, it's just simple, right? So highly recommend it. Yes. Are we paying for two hotel rooms for

00:35:06.880 | the same night? In essence, we are, right? Because we've got our hotel in Switzerland and we've got

00:35:10.880 | our rented apartment in Europe or in Italy, but it's worth it. It's great. Once you've figured

00:35:16.240 | out where you want to go and you're starting to book things, in the U.S. it might be more

00:35:19.280 | straightforward sometimes where it's like, well, you just go look online. There's lots of sites

00:35:22.800 | that have hotels. Does that apply everywhere else in the world? Or are there places where

00:35:27.680 | looking for a place to stay isn't as simple as going to booking.com, Google hotel search?

00:35:33.680 | Sure. I think when you look at the big booking engines like booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb,

00:35:40.080 | others, hotels.com, they've done a great job of trying to gobble up most of the available

00:35:44.480 | inventory that's out there for rent in private homes, apartments, etc. throughout these cities.

00:35:51.440 | So when you're looking online on those sites, you're probably going to find most of what's

00:35:56.160 | out there. I think the question and sort of hack angle here is, are you getting the best deal by

00:36:01.120 | looking on those sites? Oftentimes, I've found that if I actually find a suitable accommodation

00:36:06.320 | and I either Google the name of that accommodation and do a reverse image search to find if they have

00:36:12.160 | got their own website for that villa or that apartment, or if they're managed by an apartment

00:36:17.360 | rental company, if I can find that rental company, or even find sometimes that the hotels themselves

00:36:22.400 | are directly bookable and they're cheaper. If I just book on their website, I can save some bucks.

00:36:28.560 | And so I definitely do that and highly recommend that for our clients. What you're also asking

00:36:33.280 | about is, are there like hyper-regional Paris apartment rentals in the 14th that you can just

00:36:40.480 | find a website dedicated to that? And the answer is yes, there are. There's rental agencies that

00:36:45.520 | specialize in certain areas, certain neighborhoods, and those guys usually will have a website that

00:36:51.680 | will catalog what's available for them, but they may not be in English or they may not be consumer

00:36:57.920 | friendly to a North American audience. So it's worth doing your diligence and understanding,

00:37:03.200 | am I getting the best deal? Am I in the right area? Is there a specialist who just focuses in

00:37:07.680 | on this area? Where we go in Northern Italy often, there's a little real estate agency,

00:37:14.000 | basically, that has summer rentals for Italians. And so we negotiate directly with them on what

00:37:20.160 | apartments are available through them. And they send us Airbnb-like listings for their apartments.

00:37:26.320 | It's all in Italian and we sort of negotiate it and figure it out.

00:37:30.640 | And would those have shown up on Booking.com if you've looked?

00:37:33.600 | They might have. In fact, that agency is listed on Booking.com. The pricing is a lot higher and

00:37:39.520 | the terms and conditions are very different. So I wouldn't recommend booking there unless that was

00:37:44.320 | the sort of safest and easiest thing for you. We're fine navigating and negotiating in Italian.

00:37:50.080 | Not everybody can do that or not everybody wants to do that. So Booking.com is a great

00:37:54.960 | avenue for that. But if you're willing to sort of noodle around, especially in Paris,

00:37:59.040 | especially in some other European cities where neighborhoods really, really matter,

00:38:03.280 | Madrid is one of them, there's local real estate agencies that can help with this.

00:38:07.760 | That are going to be a better deal going direct.

00:38:09.520 | Yeah. And again, I wouldn't do it for a three-night stay or maybe even a week-long stay,

00:38:13.120 | but a multi-week, month-long, etc. stay, absolutely.

00:38:17.920 | Okay. And then we've also covered, just like on flights, hotel points, deals. Similarly,

00:38:24.000 | lots of alerting tools, lots of search tools that we've covered in past episodes. And like flights,

00:38:30.880 | keep an eye on it. A lot of hotels and flights have pretty flexible cancellation policies.

00:38:36.640 | I know it can give a little bit of anxiety when you think, "Okay,

00:38:40.560 | we haven't fully committed." So I'd encourage people to say, "No, we're committed to this."

00:38:45.360 | Right. And turn off the alerts for things that you're not so excited about that it would be an

00:38:50.400 | easy switch. Right.

00:38:51.520 | Because what you don't want is here are three okay hotels. You picked the one that was available or

00:38:55.680 | the best deal. And then the other one's a similar deal. And now you're like looking at the nuance

00:39:00.480 | of, "Oh, what kind of soap do they use in the shower?" Or like, "What hours is the breakfast

00:39:04.080 | open?" And you're kind of reviews of the breakfast and like, "Oh, the croissants were stale this

00:39:07.280 | morning." Yeah. Now you're back at the optimizer's curse. But if you're looking for points in a city

00:39:12.960 | and you've booked a standard double tree hotel, and you've got your eye on an amazing deal using

00:39:20.720 | your Hilton free nights at a Waldorf, and that pops up, no brainer.

00:39:25.120 | Scoop it. Yeah.

00:39:25.760 | Take it. Well, one of the things they'll say that's a pitfall around this optimizer's curse

00:39:29.920 | and holding options is that people often forget to cancel the things they've booked

00:39:34.560 | as a hedge or sort of as a backup. And so I would do whatever you can in your scaffolding,

00:39:38.640 | in your remindering of yourself, in your calendaring to make sure that you know that,

00:39:42.560 | "Okay, if July 30th is the last date, you can cancel this." Like cancel on the 28th just to

00:39:46.480 | be safest, right? You've got time zone differences, all that. Because the last thing you want is to

00:39:50.400 | have to beg your way out of a hotel booking or to have it be non-refundable and you're in trouble.

00:39:55.200 | So set yourself alerts and reminders for that.

00:39:58.560 | You joined me for episode one and we talked about this email path.

00:40:02.400 | For anyone who hasn't been here for all the years,

00:40:06.480 | what do you like to do every time you have a hotel book?

00:40:08.720 | Well, I want to introduce myself. I want to let the hotel know who I am and why I'm staying there,

00:40:12.880 | how long I intend to come in. Maybe I'm checking in the first thing in the morning once my flight

00:40:18.000 | lands and I booked for the, of course, afternoon. They're not expecting me at 9.30 AM, but I'd love

00:40:23.440 | to get in there, right? So I want to let them know, "Hey, I'm Chris, traveling with my wife,

00:40:28.320 | Amy. Here are our kids. We're coming in from a red-eye. We're going to hopefully sleep on the

00:40:31.760 | plane, but we'll be exhausted by the time we get there. We know we will. Any chance you could let

00:40:35.520 | us in? By the way, yes, there are four of us and here's how we normally do bedding in our rooms.

00:40:40.160 | Would it be possible if we need to adjust the reservation, if there's a $50 a night rollaway

00:40:44.480 | fee, whatever, please let me know." Explain more about your family, who you are, what are you doing

00:40:50.160 | in town, right? "Well, the day we arrive, we're going to be exhausted. We're going to take a nap.

00:40:53.680 | We want to take a shower. We'd love to have a 5 PM dinner, even though they don't do dinner in

00:40:57.920 | 5 PM in Europe, but we'll be exhausted. Is there any way you can help us out with a reservation

00:41:02.160 | at the bar or at the downstairs restaurant? The next day we're going to Montmartre. We'll be up

00:41:07.840 | at 7.00. Is breakfast served at 7.30?" Whatever the questions are you want to ask, ask them there.

00:41:13.600 | Give that hotel all that information they need to know about you to make your stay there special.

00:41:18.720 | Why does that matter? Because this is their shot to shine, right? They want to really make

00:41:22.880 | your stay dazzle. And if they do, they know that you're going to come back, you're going to go

00:41:27.200 | home and tell friends. So that's their whole goal for while you're there. So the more information

00:41:31.680 | you can give them, the more responsive they can be to that information and take better care of you.

00:41:35.360 | So I would highly recommend emailing them ahead of time. Then I'd recommend a couple of days prior

00:41:40.400 | to your arrival, re-emailing them in case anything's changed. Plans do change, right?

00:41:45.520 | "Hey, our youngest has been a little snotty lately. So we might need a local pharmacy."

00:41:50.880 | Just alerting your concierge just in case, right? Or, "Hey, we really love... Our five-year-old's

00:41:57.840 | into giraffes. Can you put a giraffe balloon in the room when we get there? I've seen it all."

00:42:02.000 | Whatever. But let the hotel know who you are and how they can make your stay special.

00:42:07.440 | And you'll see it's night and day what happens. Yeah. I would say of the listeners that have

00:42:13.040 | written in, 50-plus percent at something happening. Someone's gone and said, "Oh,

00:42:18.400 | it's my daughter's birthday." And there was a massive birthday celebration. "Oh,

00:42:22.000 | we're celebrating this thing. There was an upgrade." Someone had their initials monogrammed

00:42:27.520 | on pillows. Right. Thought that was a bit strange. But they do it. They do it sometimes.

00:42:31.760 | And it's memorable and they share that experience. And that's what the hotel wants you to do. So

00:42:36.000 | empower them to help you. Great. And you talked about the concierge. Let's talk about

00:42:40.560 | what you do when you're in a place. Yeah. You're now decided, "OK, we've got our hotel. We've got

00:42:46.240 | our scaffolding. We know we're going to spend four days, Tokyo, Paris, Cartagena, wherever it is in

00:42:51.920 | the world." How do you start to fill out the day and make sure you're doing the most but not

00:42:57.520 | overwhelming yourself? Yeah. So I think it goes back to that mindset. Right. And using that as

00:43:01.440 | the ultimate filter of what is it that we want to accomplish on this trip in this place. By the way,

00:43:05.920 | your stay in Paris may be very different from your stay out on the beach. Right.

00:43:09.600 | And so noting that ahead of time and optimizing for that is really important. Then I'd go back

00:43:15.600 | to that concierge if you're staying at a hotel. Right. And go back to that concierge and say,

00:43:18.800 | "Hey, you know, we're in Paris for three nights. We want to have an action-packed three days here.

00:43:23.440 | What do you recommend? Here's our family profile, as you know. What do you recommend we do? Can you

00:43:27.520 | give me some sample itineraries that other families have done that you've helped them with?

00:43:31.440 | We will review that itinerary and we'll come back to you with the areas that we want you to help us

00:43:36.480 | reserve, whether it's museums or car services or whatever. Right. So that's one avenue to do it.

00:43:42.320 | Second is to take a look at literally Googling child-friendly activities Paris. Right. Or like,

00:43:48.320 | is the Musée d'Orsay the best for a five-year-old? Like those kinds of questions,

00:43:52.320 | Google and chat GPT. Of course, your friends can help inform that as well.

00:43:56.000 | But I think when you start with the mindset, you apply it to the scaffolding of your trip and you

00:44:01.840 | say, "These are the amounts of activity each day that I want to have. And these are the key

00:44:07.040 | capstones in each day that I want to have." I like to look at it as one key activity per day,

00:44:12.400 | one museum visit, one meal, one whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish for that day.

00:44:17.280 | And then build kind of the day around that. So maybe you've got Musée d'Orsay tickets at 11

00:44:23.520 | a.m. Maybe your hotel is an hour walk away from the museum or a 15-minute metro ride.

00:44:29.520 | Take the hour walk, right? Enjoy walking through town and make that hour walk an hour and a half.

00:44:34.640 | So now you know you have to leave at 9.15 because you want to beat the museum 15 minutes early to

00:44:39.760 | make sure you're in there on time, in case of security lines, whatever. So that's now your

00:44:45.040 | morning activity leading up into the museum. Or maybe you know that your kids are terrible

00:44:49.040 | getting out the house in the morning and you need to budget some extra time. So what you want to do

00:44:54.400 | is optimize for metro there, walking back. And maybe along the walking path on the way back,

00:45:00.240 | you'll stop for lunch and you'll enjoy yourselves. So we apply a little different version of this to

00:45:05.440 | whenever we plan Japan because people who go to Japan always want to go to the Toyosu fish market

00:45:10.880 | and they want to be up at 5 in the morning to go see the 4 in the morning to go see the auction

00:45:16.400 | activity. When you fly from the U.S. to Japan, you end up having the first night that you're in town.

00:45:23.200 | You usually go to bed right as you get there and you wake up at the crack of dawn because

00:45:26.800 | your body is still all jet lagged. One of the things we do is we book that Toyosu fish market

00:45:31.920 | for either the first or the second day you're in Japan. And we make sure that that's built

00:45:36.160 | into your itinerary as your capstone that day. And that kind of the rest of the day is at leisure or

00:45:40.800 | chill because you'll come home, you'll want to have a little nap, you'll have a nice lunch.

00:45:45.680 | Maybe you'll go to a park in the afternoon and that'll be your day. Right. So we try to use

00:45:51.520 | logistics and that scaffolding intelligently for what that traveler experience is going to be.

00:45:57.200 | And again, not packing too much into one day. You don't want to go to Toyosu and then,

00:46:02.800 | you know, a shrine right after that, and then a big market tour in the afternoon,

00:46:07.680 | and then go to a giant three mission star meal that evening. You'll be exhausted.

00:46:10.880 | Right. Dorset with kids. That's your activity for the day. You're walking around parks,

00:46:16.480 | walking around neighborhoods, you're doing some shopping, some eating. That's your day.

00:46:20.080 | And where do you go to find some of these things that aren't as obvious as, you know, a museum,

00:46:25.760 | you could just book tickets online. But whether it's an experience, a tour, how do you think about

00:46:31.440 | sites like Airbnb Experiences, Viator, and any other ones as avenues to find things to do?

00:46:39.600 | Yeah, I love them. I mean, look, I think Airbnb Experiences is a really interesting marketplace.

00:46:43.920 | Sort of currently they've paused it. It's still active. You can book things,

00:46:48.080 | but they're not adding a lot of inventory to that space just yet. But I think that will be

00:46:52.480 | a very big arena for them to play in. Viator is great because if you can think of a tour,

00:47:00.240 | Viator probably has it in that city. And so you can know, okay, this is a thing to do,

00:47:04.640 | or maybe not to do. You can also read great reviews on the tour guide or that experience

00:47:08.800 | from other people. If you're totally blue sky and new to a city and you're trying to plan it out,

00:47:13.840 | I like to look at context tours. They're an amazingly sort of higher range, both

00:47:20.960 | private as well as small group tour. And they tend to have the sort of more specialist tours

00:47:28.320 | in each town. And they give you a really good sense of how much time I'll need in this town,

00:47:33.520 | right? So they might have the same experience sort of across seven or eight different of their tours.

00:47:40.960 | So you kind of know, okay, this is one thing I have to experience while I'm there. Or it might

00:47:45.120 | be not that exciting to you and you're like, well, I want to do everything that doesn't include that

00:47:48.880 | piece, right? And you don't have to book a context tour. At all. But use them as a good curated

00:47:54.800 | tour site. Correct. Correct. And I would say on the whole, we've never had a client book a context

00:48:01.120 | tour and be like, "Oh, this is terrible." People are really appreciative of the experience,

00:48:05.120 | the knowledge of those guides, et cetera. So it's actually a great resource to use to study,

00:48:10.160 | but also if you did want to splurge for one, it's great to do as well.

00:48:14.320 | Yeah. We've definitely booked some, I can't remember all the sites. There was

00:48:18.000 | one that was like show around. There was one where it was like individual tour marketplaces.

00:48:22.640 | I remember we went to Greece and we went to the Acropolis and we went on this tour and we thought,

00:48:25.760 | "Oh, it'd be cool to get a little history." But this was like the driest, most boring history

00:48:31.680 | tour ever. That's tough. And it's hot. And I think there are some people who would really want that.

00:48:35.760 | That wasn't us. And I think just trying to figure out what it is you're looking for

00:48:41.680 | in the tour versus it being the highest rated might apply the same lessons you said. Make sure

00:48:46.720 | you know what you want out of this. But I do love the experience of booking a local... If you find

00:48:54.240 | marketplaces for things like that, you remove the middleman, maybe get a better deal, but a little

00:49:00.880 | bit of a mixed bag sometimes. Well, I think for the key things that are the most important ones

00:49:05.040 | for your trip, those capstone events each day, if you don't have a confident feeling that this is

00:49:11.280 | the place I want to go, I want to go to Context or I want to go to Viator, go to your hotel concierge

00:49:15.280 | if you have one and ask them and say, "Look, I'm looking for a young person who will guide me

00:49:21.120 | through the local markets as a local person. I don't want to go to a tourist market. I want to

00:49:25.440 | go to the vintage market and I want to have somebody who knows the vintage market walk me

00:49:29.040 | through." Who do you know? And just ask them for a bio on that tour guide. Confirm the availability

00:49:35.120 | of that person. But understand who would it be who'd be walking me through this experience and

00:49:40.160 | am I willing to pay for that? And if you are, then scoop it up through whichever channel you can get.

00:49:44.880 | The last thing you want is to go on a generic, boring, dry, tasteless tour where that's your

00:49:49.920 | capstone of the day and that's the thing you came to do in that town. So I pay keen attention to

00:49:55.040 | that. When we fill out the scaffolding for people, we highlight and circle what's the most important

00:50:00.400 | thing they're doing that day and how do we make sure it's a success and then everything else from

00:50:04.640 | there flows. I wouldn't recommend this for children or at least young children. But the

00:50:10.720 | free walking tours in almost every city are so good. I don't think we've ever been on one we

00:50:16.640 | didn't enjoy. They are all free. And then, of course, work for tips. So you really have to be

00:50:23.280 | good in order to make money doing it. Otherwise, you wouldn't be doing it. And so I love that

00:50:27.440 | they are not usually private. So the challenge there is if you bring kids and they want to slow

00:50:32.640 | down or take a break, you're kind of you're kind of lost. But I highly recommend free walking tours.

00:50:38.800 | I imagine almost any city in the world, you type city name, free walking tour, and you will find

00:50:43.280 | it. And they run almost every day, multiple times a day in some cases. I love doing that on the

00:50:49.520 | first day. Yeah, because you often get a good sense of what is this city? What is a local like

00:50:55.040 | what's going on? You know that it's a pretty low key activity. Yeah. So that's something we do a

00:51:01.680 | lot. Well, and also, if you know that you connect with that vibe of that tour guide, then you can

00:51:06.160 | ask them at the end of that tour. Hey, listen, we're looking for like these things these next

00:51:10.240 | couple of days. What would you recommend? What's the best park for kids? What's the best place for

00:51:13.920 | us to go buy X, Y and Z? Hey, we want to really mellow restaurant tonight. What do you recommend?

00:51:17.840 | And they have the answers to that. Right. What's also great is that you can then amplify that to

00:51:22.720 | your friends and family and your social crowd. So as you post a selfie with them on Instagram tag,

00:51:28.160 | you know, Stanislaus touring me around Warsaw today was the most amazing guy X, Y, Z. Here's

00:51:32.640 | his Instagram handle. Right. And now when people are knowing in the future, they're going to put

00:51:37.040 | that in their travel inspiration folder. They're going to read it to Stanislaus to be like, when

00:51:40.000 | are you touring? I want to tour with you. Right. Happens all the time. Love that. I also think

00:51:45.760 | one thing that has been interesting is. Short form video on the Internet for long form activities

00:51:53.600 | can be a little deceptive, and so it's interesting because we're planning this trip to Iceland for

00:51:58.320 | listeners, and I remember planning the entire thing with Brandon, who's the tour guide and who

00:52:03.840 | I interviewed on an episode about Iceland. And I would find these videos. I'm like, well, this looks

00:52:08.000 | really cool. Like we get to go inside a volcano. Like, why are we doing this? And he's like, you

00:52:12.000 | just watched the like 30 second video of it. He's like, why don't you go look on YouTube and find

00:52:17.200 | someone who painstakingly took a GoPro on like this long version of the entire adventure? And

00:52:23.440 | you'll be like, that wasn't actually that exciting. And so as much as some of the content can be

00:52:28.160 | boring, there seems to be no shortage of people who have recorded every second of almost every

00:52:33.920 | activity in every city. It's true. And you will find that some activities might have made your

00:52:39.760 | inspiration list in a one minute clip. And then when you watch the 10 minute, 20 minute, 45 minute,

00:52:46.720 | 90 minute version, you're like, that's not how I want to spend my day. So when it comes to

00:52:51.040 | inspiration for activities, YouTube has a lot of good options that cover a little bit longer form.

00:52:56.880 | Sometimes people share their highlights, and I found it really easy to quickly be like, actually,

00:53:01.680 | I don't want to do that. Yeah, I do want to do that. Totally. And that's important in this sort

00:53:05.280 | of like mood board for your trip. Put a negative space in there where you're like, I would really

00:53:10.080 | like to avoid these things. I don't want to go to St. Mark's Square in the middle of the day when

00:53:15.520 | 50,000 people are there, and it's a zoo, and I'm just claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same

00:53:20.160 | time, and it's too much. But I do want to go at 11 o'clock at night when there's a tango musician

00:53:26.320 | playing, and there's somebody dancing, and it's quiet, and there's pigeons, and me, and the sea.

00:53:31.440 | By the way, you may want the exact opposite of that. You may want to go see All Colors of Life

00:53:35.200 | showing up to check out midday St. Mark's. Who knows? But put that out there. Circle what you

00:53:42.720 | do and don't want to do, and make sure you come back to that as you finalize your trip plans.

00:53:46.560 | And you said this, though not explicitly, the wandering and getting lost in a city

00:53:51.920 | is so incredible. Yeah. Even in a small little village, right? That's where you see the true

00:53:58.240 | essence of life in that. Look, I love St. Mark's Square in Venice, but the best parts of Venice

00:54:03.600 | are little canals and bridges into the smallest neighborhoods where you hear a woman singing as

00:54:10.240 | she's cooking sofrito in her kitchen, right? And you see a guy who's fixing part of his boat

00:54:16.880 | in a little canal, and that's what he's been doing all morning. And it's not like the tourist

00:54:21.040 | hubba-bubba. It's just life, right? And that's, for me, why I travel. I love to get lost and

00:54:26.320 | explore, but you got to build time in to do that. And if you're hoping to find the right spot,

00:54:33.760 | and maybe you're lost along the way, and maybe you're running late to your activity or otherwise,

00:54:38.560 | it might be hard for you to take in the moment and appreciate that this is a gift that you're

00:54:43.440 | getting to experience, right? But I would highly recommend that anytime you can purposely build in

00:54:49.920 | getting lost, you do. Yeah. I did an episode with Rolf Potts, who wrote this book, Vagabonding,

00:54:54.720 | and we talked about flaneuring, which is basically a term for just kind of getting lost and being.

00:55:01.680 | And I would encourage you, when you see that person tinkering on that boat, go ask them what

00:55:05.680 | they're doing. Maybe they speak English, maybe they don't, but it never hurts to ask. And I've

00:55:10.080 | had some really interesting conversations just talking to people on random streets. I remember

00:55:17.040 | in India, someone invited us into their workshop. That was so great. So lots of tips there. You

00:55:23.440 | mentioned concierge a lot. And for someone not staying at a hotel, they might be thinking, "Oh,

00:55:28.800 | well, my credit card comes with a concierge." Is that a concierge you can trust for a lot of

00:55:33.040 | these kind of local activities? No. So I would trust a local for those local activities. I

00:55:38.720 | would not trust somebody who's a generalist, right? And so I'll tell you very honestly,

00:55:44.880 | when we work in a market that we don't know so well, we work through a destination management

00:55:49.680 | company, a destination expert, right? Who really knows that little village, that little town,

00:55:56.560 | and how to make things happen. And the reason for that is that the internet and chat GPT now

00:56:04.000 | can kind of answer generic questions for you on a very high level about something.

00:56:08.480 | But when you want to know what is the best bakery in a certain town and why,

00:56:12.480 | you need to go to a local. You need to go to somebody who has on-the-ground experience. And so

00:56:16.080 | if you're staying at an Airbnb or a Verbo, I've all the time reached out to those hosts and said,

00:56:21.680 | "Hey, hi. This is who I am. This is my family. This is what we're coming to do.

00:56:25.120 | What do you recommend for X, Y, and Z, right? We want to wake up in the morning and go to do this.

00:56:29.360 | Is this a good idea?" We're staying in Monaco at the end of the month just for one night.

00:56:33.520 | And I'm like, "We've got five hours basically to see all of the highlights of Monaco

00:56:37.840 | from a local's perspective. I don't want to go to the casino only. I want to do what a local would

00:56:42.320 | do, what a Monegasque person would really enjoy. How do you do that?" I have an awesome itinerary

00:56:48.320 | back 24 hours later, right? So you ask a local for what their experience is. Take it with a

00:56:54.640 | grain of salt. It may not be you, right? He might've said, "Oh, but watch shopping and

00:56:58.480 | not into watches." That's fine. Filter it. But definitely start with somebody who is on-the-ground

00:57:05.200 | or close to. And nowadays, there are travel content people who are beyond just kind of like

00:57:11.760 | Instagram video stuff. And so when I did an episode on London with Jess Dante, she runs this

00:57:18.320 | Love in London blog. And she actually has these neighborhood-specific guides where she's reviewed

00:57:25.200 | everything that she sells for reasonable prices. I don't know the directory of all of those people,

00:57:31.440 | but I imagine in almost every city in the world, major cities at least, there's someone who has

00:57:36.400 | some content that you could book. And I imagine if you booked that through their site and you

00:57:42.400 | emailed them with some questions, they would probably answer them. Oh, in a heartbeat.

00:57:45.760 | If you don't have a hotel concierge or you booked an Airbnb, but it's really through a property

00:57:49.840 | management company run in another city, I would look for that or I would go on the free walking

00:57:54.800 | tour, ask the local there or walk into a restaurant or a bar on the first day and ask someone working

00:58:01.760 | there. One thing Amy and I realized was we just don't love going to art and history museums. And

00:58:08.400 | if we do, it's like one in a trip. And so there are cities that we've been to where we ask people

00:58:14.320 | what to do. And we look at the guidebooks and they would say, "If you're there for a week,

00:58:19.040 | spend three or four days going to museums. Or if you're in Cambodia, go to Angkor Wat, but go for

00:58:24.960 | four days. Get the four-day pass." And we loved going to Angkor Wat for a day. But at the end

00:58:30.560 | of the day, I was sure that we didn't wanna go for three more. It just wasn't our type of travel.

00:58:35.360 | We'd much rather go get lost and eat food in some local village. And so don't let the guidebook,

00:58:42.880 | the recommendations influence you to do something that you know isn't what you want. So those notes

00:58:49.120 | you like to take after a trip, keep those in mind. Well, to add to that, Chris, if you go,

00:58:54.160 | you build three days in your itinerary of museums each day. And on day one, you're like, "I'm pretty

00:58:59.600 | museumed out." Great. You don't have to go to day two and three if you don't want to. You can have

00:59:03.840 | that flexibility built into your itinerary that you can just take a left turn here and decide to

00:59:07.920 | do something totally different and be okay with that. Again, it's all about mindset. It's all

00:59:11.680 | about the flexibility of building your trip the way you want it to be, but also not feeling like

00:59:15.840 | you're stuck in that trip that you have to check every single box on that itinerary. If after day

00:59:20.960 | one, you're over museums, write down on your itinerary, "Pretty done with museums." And then

00:59:26.080 | now what you know in the future, when you come back to look at that trip review, "Okay, I'm going

00:59:30.560 | to book way fewer museums in the future because this was enough for me." Yeah. Love that. So I

00:59:35.760 | think we've covered a lot of the things that you need to do. We talked about itinerary management.

00:59:40.160 | So now you've got this whole trip put together. We talked about TripIt. Anything else you think

00:59:44.640 | about when you're organizing all of this in advance? Well, look, we keep coming back to the

00:59:49.680 | word "scaffolding," but it's so important because you want to visually look at your entire trip to

00:59:53.840 | understand what are the elements that go into it, what are the key things you need to know,

00:59:56.960 | key times, et cetera. I love to copy that and make sure it's on my calendar. One key note here is

01:00:01.920 | that if you're using a Google Gmail address and you're using Google Calendar, you may get these

01:00:07.760 | automatic updates to your calendar where Google's like, "Oh, we noticed you've got a train ticket,"

01:00:11.840 | and they'll plop it into your calendar. Sweet. Just double check that those times are actually

01:00:16.960 | correct. Oftentimes, I've seen that trains, sometimes even flights, will end up at the wrong

01:00:22.400 | time zone, which is mind-blowing, on my Google Calendar. So it might be 9 or 10 or 12 hours off,

01:00:28.480 | which is like no bueno, right? So you can just edit the event in your Google Calendar and bring

01:00:33.600 | it to the right time. That's great. But definitely put things on the spreadsheet,

01:00:37.440 | put things on the calendar, and then go back and take a look at what are you referencing from your

01:00:42.240 | original trip planning, ideation, dreaming, visioning, to what is actually happening,

01:00:49.040 | and are you living the trip of your dreams? Is this trip something that you wanted to do

01:00:54.640 | when you thought of it originally and it's evolved, or are you sort of like shoehorning

01:00:59.360 | yourself into a trip? And just be present with that for a minute, right? Nothing's wrong,

01:01:03.520 | but it's interesting to look at what you're dreaming of and what actually you've planned.

01:01:07.680 | And then post-trip, I like to go back and kind of figure out, "Okay, well, what worked and what

01:01:11.360 | didn't and why?" And use that same organization, make notes on, "Okay, this transfer time was too

01:01:16.720 | short. I needed longer here. I need to have a longer layover. I didn't like this hotel because

01:01:22.240 | it was in a crappy location, and I thought it was better because of the research I did online, and

01:01:26.640 | next time I'll do different research," right? So kind of have like a post-trip notes that you can

01:01:30.720 | take that you can then use every time you're future planning all your other travels.

01:01:34.960 | A lot of my clients like to have this in TripIt, right? Because TripIt for them is their sort of

01:01:40.480 | single source of truth. I think it's a great tool. As you said, it monitors for changes and delays,

01:01:45.440 | and that's awesome. TripIt can be a little clunky sometimes for some people. They don't like it.

01:01:50.160 | They'd rather have it in Google Sheets or a printable PDF, which we do a lot for people.

01:01:55.520 | But whatever system works for you, make sure you do and make sure you file that somewhere so you

01:02:01.200 | can go back and reference it later or share it with friends later.

01:02:03.600 | One thing that I was surprised about was when I first started traveling years ago is that,

01:02:10.160 | for example, if you've never been abroad, when you go through customs, they're like,

01:02:13.840 | "Where are you staying? What's the address? What's the phone number for the hotel?"

01:02:17.440 | And you can be caught off guard. "Well, I don't know all these things." And so

01:02:20.560 | having some place where you're like, "This is the hotel we're staying at. This is the

01:02:24.560 | address and the phone number." That's where TripIt can become a lot of handy.

01:02:28.240 | It comes back to another point, which is being able to access all of this. You need data. Now,

01:02:34.320 | I think nowadays, it's a lot easier to find a free Wi-Fi or just have data that travels with you

01:02:41.200 | if you're on T-Mobile or Google Fi. It just works internationally.

01:02:45.520 | If you're on carriers like Mint Mobile, you can actually now buy international plans or you could

01:02:51.600 | buy eSIMs from sites like AirAllo where you can just get local SIM cards for data. And you could

01:02:56.320 | do it electronically so you don't even need the physical SIM card anymore. But just make sure you

01:03:00.160 | have that information and make sure you can access it because you'll always be surprised when you

01:03:05.760 | might need to know where you're going, what the address is, what the phone number is, or something

01:03:10.480 | like that. Totally. And I will call out that it's very important to send your itinerary to somebody

01:03:15.360 | who's not traveling with you just to be safe. You never know what might happen, God forbid,

01:03:19.840 | overseas or what might be going on in your life. And you might need somebody else's eyes on

01:03:24.560 | your safety or your security at certain points. So, definitely share that around. Does that mean

01:03:29.360 | you need to tell everyone where you are or make sure that everybody has your confirmation numbers?

01:03:34.480 | No, don't post it online. Just share it with friends or family. And if you do come into

01:03:39.120 | problems, we've had multiple people send the advice in that you would be surprised at how

01:03:44.880 | helpful your local embassy can be abroad. 100%.

01:03:47.680 | And similarly, you can be very surprised at how unhelpful local police stations can be.

01:03:54.880 | Yes. You hopefully don't have to visit either of those places. But if you do lose a phone,

01:03:59.200 | for instance, and your phone's your single source of truth that has all of your data on it,

01:04:02.400 | you need to go to your local police office, talk to them, make sure that they have a filed police

01:04:08.240 | report so you can claim insurance later on. The downside is there's crookedness sometimes and

01:04:15.840 | there's bureaucracy and red tape and that could take you a whole day just to file that police

01:04:19.920 | report, but it's very important to do. But if God forbid there's a real issue, go to your embassy

01:04:24.240 | or consulate and there are the people who can really help you. And make sure that the people

01:04:28.720 | at home who know where you're traveling know that you've gone to the embassy or consulate

01:04:33.360 | to be helpful as well. They may be called upon to provide backup data or whatever that you might

01:04:37.840 | need. Yeah. But for things like I'm having a medical emergency, obviously go to a hospital,

01:04:42.240 | but I'm having a medical situation that I'm not sure what to deal with, or we lost our passport.

01:04:46.320 | Yeah. Embassy is a great place to go. We've planned our trip. We've mapped it out. We know

01:04:49.680 | where we're going, what we're doing. We're going to have a great time. What are other little details

01:04:54.160 | of things to figure out? One that comes to mind for me is accessing money. I think a long time

01:05:00.560 | ago, people would try to exchange money at home. Now, I think the only thing that you should be

01:05:06.000 | doing is taking money out of an ATM, unless you've learned that ATMs don't work in this

01:05:11.120 | country. And then in which case you'll probably be better off bringing larger denomination US

01:05:16.640 | dollars. Correct. Clean. Yeah. Clean, not ripped. In the US, everyone takes every dollar. Overseas,

01:05:23.680 | some places don't take $1 bills. Some places don't take old crumply dollar bills,

01:05:27.920 | but there are a handful of banks, Fidelity, Schwab that reimburse overseas international ATM fees.

01:05:35.680 | I talked about a whole episode on bank, the best banks and listed a lot of these,

01:05:39.600 | but ATM is where I get currency. At the airport right away, no problem. Don't care about the

01:05:45.680 | whatever fee to take it out because I have a bank that's going to reimburse that fee anyway.

01:05:49.440 | Exactly. In addition to banking is travel insurance when it makes sense for their needs.

01:05:54.000 | And I would say that for most people, they're okay risking it, but you have to take a look at

01:06:00.800 | what is refundable, what is non-refundable, what are the costs that if you were to cancel last

01:06:05.920 | minute, you would basically have to eat, right? So those are museum tickets. Sometimes they're

01:06:10.880 | non-refundable hotels, but like airfare, if you booked on points and miles and you can cancel

01:06:15.600 | last minute, great, good for you. You're getting your refunds back. If you've booked with cash,

01:06:19.840 | are you able to use that same airline in the future and use the credit you have as a canceled

01:06:25.840 | ticket on that airline? Ask yourself these questions, understand what's the right amount

01:06:29.520 | that you should be insuring for in the event that something were to spur you to cancel,

01:06:35.200 | and then take a look at the ways you bought those tickets, paid for those airline tickets or hotels

01:06:41.280 | or experiences. If it's on a credit card that carries some travel insurance benefit, great,

01:06:46.800 | but understand what the limitations of those benefits are so that you know if insurance

01:06:51.120 | really makes sense or not. Yeah. And I was surprised it's not actually as expensive as

01:06:55.360 | I had thought. No. And in many cases, it covers medical related things that you might not know

01:07:02.880 | about even though your insurance might cover it. I don't know whether Cigna is going to cover my

01:07:09.440 | health insurance situation abroad, but I know that even if they are, it's going to be a pain

01:07:13.600 | in the ass. A giant pain in the ass. So God forbid you got to go to a hospital, at least you're

01:07:17.120 | covered to start and you can go from there. Yeah. And so there's probably plenty of companies out

01:07:22.400 | there. We've used Trawick before and we've used World Nomads before. I'm not going to say that

01:07:26.960 | there aren't better ones. Maybe there's ones you've used, but those are two I've looked at.

01:07:30.480 | We tend to look at a dozen different insurance options depending on who the travelers are and

01:07:33.920 | what their needs are and where they're going, obviously. I wouldn't highlight one over the

01:07:38.640 | other. I would say that do your diligence and spend a few minutes. If you're insuring $1,000

01:07:43.280 | of value, that's one thing. If you're insuring $15,000 or $20,000, it's a little different. I

01:07:47.360 | would do a different level of diligence on those kinds of companies. But it's very important to

01:07:52.000 | understand what you can expect to get back out of insurance and why you're buying it to begin with

01:07:56.720 | before you start. So highlight what does medical coverage look like and why does that matter to me?

01:08:01.280 | Is it first payer or second? That's important. And then also take a look at what are the

01:08:05.760 | eventualities that I want to be covered for? If I lose my $1,000 iPhone while I'm over there,

01:08:10.240 | okay, well, does that get replaced? Is it a check? Do I buy it and then they reimburse me?

01:08:15.280 | How does all that work? It's helpful to know so that you can be prepared if God forbid you have

01:08:19.280 | to face that eventuality. So another thing that I recommend to people is about a week before each

01:08:23.200 | trip, I sit down with my spouse and we go through each of the trip elements that we have coming up.

01:08:28.240 | We make sure that obviously all of our passports haven't changed from what we thought. They have

01:08:32.480 | the right expiration dates and we have the right visas if we need them. Sometimes when you're doing

01:08:37.040 | a visa on arrival, by the way, they're either going to be requiring you paying local currency,

01:08:41.120 | which can be tricky if you haven't exchanged money ahead of time, or they're going to give

01:08:45.200 | you a usurious rate at the airport to exchange to be able to do that. So that's one good callout.

01:08:51.280 | Another is sometimes those visa fees are required to be paid in US dollars. Again,

01:08:56.160 | crisp, clean, newer US dollars. They don't have writings or markings on them.

01:08:59.600 | But I would highly recommend doing that trip review ahead of time and kind of walking through

01:09:05.120 | scenarios like, "Hey, do we know where our ATM card is? Do we know where our credit card is?

01:09:10.000 | Do we have a backup credit card somewhere in a different spot in case our wallet gets stolen?"

01:09:13.280 | Right? "Have you called your bank in case you need to, if you're going to a destination that

01:09:18.240 | might be a little bit dodgy or might not be so easy to be banking in?" Right? Make sure that

01:09:23.840 | somebody else is aware of your itinerary. And then the final thing that I always like to do

01:09:28.720 | is double check for the things that are flexible in our itinerary. Kind of highlight them,

01:09:33.200 | recircle them and say, "We know that we could trade this out if we needed to." Right? "We know

01:09:37.040 | that we can cancel this if we had to because it doesn't matter to us or it's not locking us in."

01:09:42.160 | So if we look at an itinerary a week out and we're like, "Whoa, this is a lot and this isn't

01:09:46.160 | matching the vision we set nine months ago when we had this idea," kind of circle and create some

01:09:50.880 | space for you to be flexible with this trip because you never know what might happen. Friends of ours

01:09:55.920 | were just in Lisbon and Morocco and the moment they got to Lisbon, their four-year-old developed

01:10:00.960 | an ear infection. And so the next three days of the Lisbon plans were out the door. Doctor was

01:10:06.080 | on the phone, local house call doctor, all of that. You can't plan for that. So circle those

01:10:12.320 | things that don't really matter in the end and know that you have some flexibility going into

01:10:16.000 | your trip and then go have amazing, amazing times. Document the hell out of it. Live in the moment.

01:10:22.080 | Don't be on your phone looking at what everybody else is doing on Instagram. Be present. Eat that

01:10:26.480 | thing. Eat another one of them and have a great time. I love it. That was a great way to wrap.

01:10:31.200 | I hope anyone planning a vacation at least got a handful of tips here so that they can make their

01:10:35.840 | next trip awesome. Amy's not here or otherwise we probably would have had a real-time breakdown

01:10:41.840 | of the trip and we would have figured out everything we're doing. But I now have a plan

01:10:46.320 | for how we're going to finalize our trip. Lee, thanks for being here. Thank you, Chris. It's

01:10:50.160 | always a pleasure. It's great to see you in this beautiful space. Congratulations to you and thank

42 Travel Planning Tips & Tricks from Travel Pro Leigh Rowan

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