Travelling as a couple – Our travel habits and insights
So how do you choose your next travel destination/holiday? Over the last few weeks we’ve been thinking about how our technique of choosing where we jet off to next differs to other tourists/travellers, and decided to share some of our travel tips. After doing some research on UK’s travel habits we were quite surprised by our findings and have decided to share our insights of how we choose our next travel destination and what travelling as a couple involves.
How do we decide on our next travel destination?
When picking a new travel destination we try and not go for the usual, so, for example, tourists heading to SE Asia tend to visit Thailand, Bali, Vietnam and Cambodia. On our recent trip, we went to Nepal, Sri Lanka and Sumatra (Indonesia) and while we obviously met other travellers it was far less often than say in Thailand where you are surrounded by them. Another big factor for choosing a travel destination is the food, we love trying different foods and sampling the local cuisine, so we always try and book onto a food tour in each country we visit.
While cost is an important factor we try not and focus too much on that, not taking the cost of flights into account we’ve found that you can travel pretty much anywhere on a budget that suits your style and needs.
Once we choose a destination we then go about planning and research what we want to do and where we want to go in each country. Unless we have to, we never go book a tour, we always book and arrange everything by ourselves. By booking the flights, transport and accommodation we have complete control of everything, and nothing is ever set in stone for us, our plans constantly change. While a group tour can have its advantages you don’t get the freedom and choice as for when you do everything independently.
Time for research, what we do.
Once we’ve decided on where we are heading next we immediately get reading other travel blog posts on the chosen destination, we find doing this not only provides us with the places we must visit but also insider tips on where to stay and negative polenta which holiday brochures won’t tell you. Trip advisor is another of our go-to sites for research, we mainly only use this for accommodation and restaurants. Finally, we also go about searching out photos on Instagram for our chosen destination, using this technique is a great way to find out about off the beaten path spots and great photo spots. We try and get as much information as possible and from that plan our route through the country visiting the places we want to visit along the way.
How much do we spend?
The amount we budget for depends on which country we are planning to visit next. On our recent trip through Asia, we were spending approximately £1500 a month for both of us, this included accommodation, transport, food and tours/excursions. We could have spent less and obviously a lot more but we got by comfortably on this amount and did everything we wanted to in each country we visited. We are now currently in New Zealand which is a lot more expensive to live than Asia and we would struggle on £1500 a month, so as we say our budget depends on what country we are visiting. But we newer not visit a country because of cost, we just adjust our budget and plan ahead, which can potentially save a lot of money.
As you would have read above the internet plays a large part in planning and booking our next destination/holiday. While we can still see a benefit of going into a high street holiday agency and booking through a company like STA Travel, we prefer to do everything ourselves. We like to be in total control of what we do and where we stay. Then if something goes wrong we only have ourselves to blame.
How do you travel? We would love to hear how you go about booking your next holiday. What techniques do you use?
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