Principles for a good life

The process of organizing a trip abroad has become orderly and efficient only after a few years of experience. It starts of course with the season ... During my time working, it was important for me to take as few vacation days as possible and take advantage of existing holidays (because as a mom working, I was always short of days off). Therefore, a large part of the trips are planned for the holidays, so the weather is usually pleasant, and less crowded abroad. As the kids grew up, and the loss of school days became more critical, we planned summer trips.

 

Destination and flights

Planning begins at least half a year before. The search for the destination progresses in parallel at two levels: relatively reasonable and cheap flights, and accommodations (mostly around vacation units we found through our timeshare company). Find a suitable place or date (according to the constraint), then schedule the flights. We managed to schedule most flights in recent years with one of the low cost companies: Eastern Europe - wizzair , Western Europe or Italy - easyjet , the Netherlands - transavia , and when there is no low cost company, the search today is very fast and effective and does not need a travel company. At lowcost companies you pay for luggage, so you need to take it into account for the total cost, and see what's more economical - small or large baggage.

 

Accommodations

As mentioned we work with a vacation exchange company that usually finds us really lucrative bonus vacations, especially at the last minute. But if we plan ahead, we usually use booking.com or airbnb . The truly pampering vacations were in lovely apartments we found on airbnb and were not disappointed even once. There are different considerations to choose from each of them: booking.com is usually cheaper, does not take a commission, does not pay in advance and usually the cancellation is free until a certain date. At airbnb we got the more spacious and beautiful apartments, and it seems that the in-depth review process filters out the apartments that do not meet the standards. Here the hosts also get a public review of the host, so if you leave an apartment in bad condition, this review goes to other hosts and they can refuse to accept you.

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Excursion map

We usually prefer star excursion, where we spend a week in one place and from there go on day trips. We try to choose the places so that there would not be long journeys of more than an hour to each destination. To select the sites, I used most of the known sites: trip advisor , another world , the traveler and more. For a trip to the cities I found a cool site that really simplifies the process of choosing the sights, builds good routes including public transport, and the app is also useful in real time: visit-a-city - highly recommended.

As the kids grew up, interests changed, and it happened that I could no longer weave to their liking ... So before the trip to Scotland, I decided to make destination choice democratic: everyone could rate a place from 1 to 5, the places with the maximum rating were visited. Sometimes we even decided to split ... everyone had one veto, that is, to oppose to one destination, and then it was not elected, or to give it a score of 6 which means that we must get there no matter what the others vote for ... The formulas for calculating the ranking are automatic within Excel ...

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Food

As for food, we usually planned breakfast and dinner in the apartment. Usually the first day of vacation would be spent on shopping for food for the week, and getting to know the neighborhood. We usually eat lunch in a restaurant, over time more planning was required due to all sorts of restrictions (veganism on the one hand and meat eaters on the other ...). Trip advisor would sometimes bring us to the more tourist restaurants, and we were often disappointed . Quite a few times we preferred to buy groceries and prepare our own ...

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Travel list

I have a list of trips (link on the side) ready that I print out before the flight and pack accordingly. Every time we find that something is missing, we add it to the list and on the next trip it is not missing.

 

A few years ago I found a template for Excel for trips (albeit in English), which helped me gather all the data in one file, calculate costs, choose different options.

This file is attached to any trip with all the details, you can download it and use as you wish.

 

Below you will find a list of our trips abroad, along with the required information - itineraries, places of interest, recommended accommodations, special activities, and of course photos ...

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