How to Create a Mid Range Trip Part 2: Research and Planning the Itinerary!

This should truly be called don't be afraid to change your itinerary after doing research!

Hi, my name is Lauren. My husband and I take 3 - 4 international trips every single year, and we are what you would consider mid-range travelers. We don't budget backpack but we also don't spend like luxury travelers. We fall somewhere right in the middle.

I am walking you through how to plan a mid-range trip and today is part 2 Research and Planning.

Once you pick the country you want to go to and buy tickets the next step is to research what you want to do. There are many places and avenues in which you can do this depending on where you like to get your information but my favorites in no particular order are:

-Vlogs

-Pinterest

-Blogs

-Youtube

-Travogram (this is a free travel app)

-and recommendations from people we know who have gone there.

The one way to really help search through all the travel content out there is I search "country we are going to" + "affordable". I find "affordable" works better for our way of traveling compared to words like "budget" or "cheap" and keeps out luxury experiences that we can not afford.

For this upcoming trip, we even went to Barnes and Noble to get an actual book that had a map in it. We will be road tripping, and wanted to make sure we had something that we would not ever lose service with.

This research will often give you a TON of ideas. Obviously, you don't have time to do everything nor the funds to do everything. So what we have done is created buckets! There is a splurge, affordable, and free/almost free bucket.

Now you get to set what the dollar amount is for each of these buckets and what cost you consider to be appropriate for your budget as well as where you are traveling. We do it per person instead of cumulative.

These are mine pre person for this upcoming trip:

Now obviously, there aren't literally buckets, but there is an awesome spreadsheet we use that you can download for free here in PDF form! This can really help you organize, what you want to do so you can plan your trip out!

Here is how to use it:

1. Find activities you would like to do.

2. Organize them by splurge, affordable, free/almost free.

3. Put in the cost of each activity (up to you if you want to do it per person or total).

4. Put down on a scale of 1-5 (1 being the least) how badly you want to do said activity.

5. After you fill out the sheet, go back and put yes if it is something you want to book or no for skipping it.

Mid-Range Bucket Planning Sheet - Sheet1.pdf

Download PDF • 41KB

When we have finished our research (or at least feel pretty good about what we have found) and have divided up everything into the buckets, we then pick 1-2 things out of the splurge bucket. These are often big ticket items that are must-sees or do in that specific country. An example of this is in Vietnam, one of our splurges was a 2 night Ha Long Bay Cruise, and in Switzerland it was going up to the top of Europe, JungFrau. By limiting this to 1 or 2 we can keep from overspending and only booking splurges.

After we pick the 1 or 2 splurges, we then go to the free/almost free bucket. We do that to immediately balance out the splurges we just did. We view anything under $10 as almost free. Often times, these are hikes, museums, free walking tours, walking around local markets, swimming, etc. We see which one of these fits best in our schedule and what makes the most sense to do.

On this upcoming trip since we are road tripping we are stopping in a lot of beautiful areas with waterfalls and hikes.

This is where you usually have the biggest changes in your itinerary because you start to realize the things you really want to see and do! It is ok to completely change where you are going based on what you want to see! We don't pick towns to stay in until we know there is either something in town we want to see or it gives us close proximity

Finally, we pick a handful of affordable options to fill in the rest. We find that often these are great fillers such as a distillery tour in North Ireland and a bike tour in Guatemala. Often these are wonderful fun things to do that aren't necessarily must sees!

What you want to do and what you want to see are the keys in creating your itinerary. Honestly, once we have picked out of our buckets that we want to do, and put it in a map it really helps us create a useful itinerary!

For planning apps here are some of my favorite that will help map it out for you:

-Google Maps is truly the GOAT for this (you can drop pins)

-Stippl

-Tripit

If something doesn't make sense going out of your way to see, that is ok sometimes that happens. If it is something you REALLY want to see make it happen. Don't be afraid to draft one version of your trip then throw it away and start over. We had 7 drafts of this trip before we felt satisfied that we were ok skipping the things we left out!

Follow along for Part 3: Finding and Booking Hotels!