After that first trip to Europe, we knew we wanted to go back. We kept thinking “Someday we’ll go back to Italy.” It took us six years to get on it and make it happen. It didn’t have to take that long and it shouldn’t have taken that long. But while we were so sure we wanted to go back, we didn’t quite know how to plan for it. So we kept pushing it off.
There is never a perfect time to go on a trip, so don’t wait for it. There are, however, good times to take a trip. Because of what’s involved, you need to give yourself time to plan and save up for it. The longest period we’ve had from when we started planning to going on the trip is nine months; the shortest is two.
Starting to plan well ahead of your trip gives you the chance to save. Airfare generally gets more expensive as you get closer to your departure date. Cheaper accommodations are snapped up early and you could be left with more expensive options or options that are not well located. And some major sights such as museums could even sell out of admission tickets.
Start your plan with a destination and a month. In August of 2018, we started planning for our next trip. Destination: South East Asia. Month: January 2019. That was enough to start. We started doing the research, talking to people and basically feeding the dream until it became a reality.
And just to make sure, we also booked our time off at work. It didn’t really matter that we didn’t have all the dates nailed down yet. As we got things fixed, it was easy to adjust the scheduled time off to match the actual dates. It would have been more difficult to book the time off with less notice at work, especially as we were looking at taking three weeks.