Planning vacations can stress you out – like, it can add more stress than he vacation is supposed to alleviate in the first place! Read on to find out planning pitfalls, and how to avoid them.
4. Disaster Planning
A popular Murphy’s Law inference is this: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. It’s unfortunate that this applies to vacations. Every frequent traveller’s has had to learn (usually painfully), that every vacation itinerary has to have its own error margins, fallback plans and failsafe built in.
Now you have two stresses to account for – that of logistics and that of potential disasters and managing both can be nightmare. Being properly pessimistic is hard. Unfortunately, there’s no real way to get around this.
What makes it easier knows about potential problems before you plan. That way you can work in error margins as you plan, not after you thought your itinerary was already perfect
3. A Jarring Change of Pace
Admit it. All those little tasks you should have done, let’s say, re-programming the water sprinkler, paying off due bills, putting your newspaper subscription on hold – you put them off until the last day, didn’t you? Most do, and suffer a huge rush of added stress right on the verge of your weekend – not the best note to start your vacation on.
And THEN you dive right into your regular lifestyle the second you come back – not even a proper night to re-calibrate yourself back out of your vacation. You know what happens then? You guessed it – STRESS! You might as well have not taken that vacation at all, just spent a few lazy days watching How I Met Your Mother re-runs.
Don’t do that to yourself. Always give yourself a good run-up to getting your affairs in order before your vacation. Always give yourself time to wind down afterwards.
2. Choice Overload
What with all the frequently shared links Top Infinite Number Of Places To Visit Before You Die that make rounds around the trip every day, the modern traveller is totally spoiled for choice. There is TOO much to see! How do you even choose?
We’ll if you make the mistake of drawing up an itinerary based on all the things you couldn’t possibly miss you’ll be planning your trip well into the next year. The best way to go about it is this: isolate your personal interests, decide that it’s going to be the highlight of your trip, and then build the rest of your trip around it. Face it there’s no way you’re covering everything at one go. And just in case you really do have the budget to chase the best of the best attractions, then you likely won’t have the time. Absorbing a destination’s culture is a large part of your vacation. If you make it all about hopping from highlight to highlight, you’re going to miss out on the best things about EVERY place.
Don’t be a shallow traveller. Be deep
1. Use Vacation Planners
Once upon a time, the travel agent was your guru – he told you where to go, how to get there, where to sleep and what to see. Wake up to the Internet people! – there’s NO way any travel agent can personalise your trip to create an experience dear to your heart! The Web’s massive repository of travel information is too much for any one mind to hold, so travel agents can’t help it but give you the most general of itineraries. So make your own!
What? Didn’t I just tell you avoid the pitfalls of choice overload? Yep, and that’s why I want to welcome you to the spanking-brand-new world of online travel itinerary planners.
Do yourself a favour and check them out. The idea is that you tell them where you want to go and what you want to see there, and you’ll have the perfect trip itineraries within minutes. You can never take the Internet for granted, not when there’s a revolution like this waiting to happen.
One of the top contenders in the young but rapidly growing travel-planning web-app game is Tripomatic – an edgy-looking, map-oriented and bare-bones trip planner. TripHobo is another young giant that’s making massive leaps – they say loud and proud that they want to become the “TripAdvisor of Itineraries” with a massive collection logistics-rich, user-generated trips that can each be tweaked and themed as you like. TripHobo scores further brownie points for making travel planning sharable across social networks!
And BANG! – that’s most of your headache taken care of.
4. Disaster Planning
A popular Murphy’s Law inference is this: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. It’s unfortunate that this applies to vacations. Every frequent traveller’s has had to learn (usually painfully), that every vacation itinerary has to have its own error margins, fallback plans and failsafe built in.
Now you have two stresses to account for – that of logistics and that of potential disasters and managing both can be nightmare. Being properly pessimistic is hard. Unfortunately, there’s no real way to get around this.
What makes it easier knows about potential problems before you plan. That way you can work in error margins as you plan, not after you thought your itinerary was already perfect
3. A Jarring Change of Pace
Admit it. All those little tasks you should have done, let’s say, re-programming the water sprinkler, paying off due bills, putting your newspaper subscription on hold – you put them off until the last day, didn’t you? Most do, and suffer a huge rush of added stress right on the verge of your weekend – not the best note to start your vacation on.
And THEN you dive right into your regular lifestyle the second you come back – not even a proper night to re-calibrate yourself back out of your vacation. You know what happens then? You guessed it – STRESS! You might as well have not taken that vacation at all, just spent a few lazy days watching How I Met Your Mother re-runs.
Don’t do that to yourself. Always give yourself a good run-up to getting your affairs in order before your vacation. Always give yourself time to wind down afterwards.
2. Choice Overload
What with all the frequently shared links Top Infinite Number Of Places To Visit Before You Die that make rounds around the trip every day, the modern traveller is totally spoiled for choice. There is TOO much to see! How do you even choose?
We’ll if you make the mistake of drawing up an itinerary based on all the things you couldn’t possibly miss you’ll be planning your trip well into the next year. The best way to go about it is this: isolate your personal interests, decide that it’s going to be the highlight of your trip, and then build the rest of your trip around it. Face it there’s no way you’re covering everything at one go. And just in case you really do have the budget to chase the best of the best attractions, then you likely won’t have the time. Absorbing a destination’s culture is a large part of your vacation. If you make it all about hopping from highlight to highlight, you’re going to miss out on the best things about EVERY place.
Don’t be a shallow traveller. Be deep
1. Use Vacation Planners
Once upon a time, the travel agent was your guru – he told you where to go, how to get there, where to sleep and what to see. Wake up to the Internet people! – there’s NO way any travel agent can personalise your trip to create an experience dear to your heart! The Web’s massive repository of travel information is too much for any one mind to hold, so travel agents can’t help it but give you the most general of itineraries. So make your own!
What? Didn’t I just tell you avoid the pitfalls of choice overload? Yep, and that’s why I want to welcome you to the spanking-brand-new world of online travel itinerary planners.
Do yourself a favour and check them out. The idea is that you tell them where you want to go and what you want to see there, and you’ll have the perfect trip itineraries within minutes. You can never take the Internet for granted, not when there’s a revolution like this waiting to happen.
One of the top contenders in the young but rapidly growing travel-planning web-app game is Tripomatic – an edgy-looking, map-oriented and bare-bones trip planner. TripHobo is another young giant that’s making massive leaps – they say loud and proud that they want to become the “TripAdvisor of Itineraries” with a massive collection logistics-rich, user-generated trips that can each be tweaked and themed as you like. TripHobo scores further brownie points for making travel planning sharable across social networks!
And BANG! – that’s most of your headache taken care of.
