Purchasing the Dream Vacation

 

Over the last few weeks, I have walked you through the background steps on setting up a dream vacation. Now, it’s time to pull it all together. You should have a file that has all of your notes of where you want to go and what you want to do. Your research will have provided you costs for the various outings that you want to do and you should have an idea of the cost involved for your flights and other transportation needs. If you’ve done your homework well, you even have hotel suggestions in the cities that you are visiting.

The next step is putting together a rough schedule so that you can begin booking tickets. I read a lot about where I am going to visit which allows me to spend less time at the actual location “taking it all in”, so to speak. I will search to find how long it takes to go through a venue and block that off. I tend to prefer doing one big location per day and do smaller venues nearby it. Remember the maps mentioned in the travel guides post? They now come to the forefront of this plan. The detailed map that shows what is around the larger venues gives you additional options to search and decide if you want to visit. If you flagged the places that you want to visit, this is where those come in to play. You have a visual aid in planning your day as to what is nearby your major location of the day.

Once you’ve got an itinerary down, you can begin purchasing tickets! The one thing that I do like to recommend is giving yourself 24 hours from when you arrive before you have to be somewhere for a ticketed entrance. For instance, on the Italy trip – we were delayed for a total of 36 hours and did end up missing one of our tours. Thankfully, trip insurance took care of the original fees, and we were able to still see the location later in the week on a day that I purposely had not planned anything. There were several other passengers on the flights we were on that missed cruise ships and connecting trips due to these unforeseen delays. When creating an itinerary, I tend to give myself a lot of flex time and acknowledge that I may just not want to do something every day that I am in the city.  Each location that we were in for the Italy trip had one day that had nearly nothing scheduled. For Rome, we made up the day we were delayed. For Florence, we took an EcoTour that we had seen while walking around the city and did some shopping. 

For Venice, we rested because we were tired.

I like the site tripmasters.com to be able to book my transportation, hotels, outings, and insurance. You can build multi-city and do everything at one time.  I have used it several times with no complaints. The key thing is when you search for everything and see the price they offer, you can compare it to your file and see if it is a good deal. Tripmasters also lets you move the days around to get the best flight price – this can save you thousands! You are also able to arrange transportation from the airport to your hotel or from your hotel to the airport. My experience is that I save a little bit of money by using Tripmasters, but the best part is that I have a single point of contact for the trip should I need any assistance in any city. The trip to Italy was for 14 days. We flew first class and stayed in 5 star hotels. We had several full day trips and multiple local sightseeing tours. We had private transportation arranged from the airport to the hotels or to the train stations. Our train accommodations were first class. We had top of the line insurance for the trip. The total cost for everything was $12K USD for 2 people. When I priced it separately, the cost was $14K USD, so the savings was a fair amount for this dream vacation.

For smaller trips with less excursions – we had 22 on the Italy trip – booking them separately works fine and is often cheaper. The only way you’ll know though is by doing the homework. When we got to Italy, things were pretty simple. We had our itinerary and knew what we were doing every day for the most part. I also had created a list of places to eat, but we also asked around for recommendations. For me, planning ahead lets me have a more pleasant trip because I don’t have to worry about what things are going to be near my main destination for the day. I hope these tips and tricks will help you plan out a wonderful dream vacation and save you some money, as well!