Even though I've honed my vacation planning process over the years, every time I sit down to plan the next trip, I'm always mildly overwhelmed by the undertaking. There's a lot of moving pieces that have to come together: the when, where, why and how of it all. Different kinds of trips demand different approaches. For our upcoming spring break trip, the process looked something like this:
Step One - When
Our school-aged kids' spring breaks overlapped for an 8-day span, so it was a pretty easy matter of nailing down the "when" for this trip. The specific details of "when" would come back into play again once we nailed down the "where".
Step Two - Deciding the Where, as Justified by the Why
The map my daughter has used for years to track the states she's traveled to.
We've nearly traveled to all of the states in the U.S. and so knew that we wanted to knock a few more off the list on this trip. So, with our motivation thus established, the next step was considering which of our 9 remaining states to hit. The biggest concentration of states-needing-to-be-visited were in the central part of the country, giving us the biggest bang for our buck, so it was settled that the trip would include Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas (I have shared previously that we're pretty aggressive in terms of covering wide swathes of ground in limited spans of time!).
The next task was to zero in on potential routes. For expediency and cost-effectiveness, I typically choose to start and end in major cities with international airports. My entire family gives me grief about it, but the tool I use for thinking a route through is MapQuest. I look at the major cities in the areas I want to go to, and then just start experimenting with various routes to see how much ground I can reasonably cover in the time I have, recording the driving time between potential stops. I'm simultaneously searching for supplemental information about those stops to inform routing decisions -- so I'm Googling "Top 10 things to do in Topeka", etc, taking in what the official travel bureaus have to say, as well as Trip Advisor rankings and recommendations from local blogs. I record the activities ideas along with links to the source materials in a Word or Google doc to reference later when I get down to details.
Through this process, after about two hours in this instance, I had a route that had us setting foot in all five states, seeing and doing things of interest in each, and which didn't have us driving more than 4.5 hours on any given day (which is the maximum I was willing to do for this trip... the ideal for us is probably around 2.5 hours a day, but to get where we wanted to go for this trip, we had to expand that ideal somewhat).
Step Three - Refining the When and How
With my route thusly roughed out, it was time to revisit timing with an eye toward making our travel most efficient and minimizing airfare expenses. Knowing that we'd be starting in Omaha, Nebraska and ending in Austin, Texas, I began looking at multi-city flight options on Kayak.com, adjusting my dates of travel to see the kinds of prices with which I'd be contenting. (Note that if you are doing a straightforward roundtrip, use Kayak's "show flexible dates" option that presents a grid with fares for the 3 days preceding and following the travel dates entered to easily see what the possibilities are for economizing -- it's sometimes astonishing what moving a trip by a day can do for its price.)
At this point in my process, a wrinkle arose in that it became apparent that there were no direct flights from our home airport, meaning for a longer travel day to get to and from our destinations. This resulted in a decision to have our daughter fly separately from the airport nearest her college to meet us in Omaha, rather than spend a day traveling to meet us and then having another full day of traveling immediately thereafter. This complicated flight booking a bit, as there was a chance that seats for her flights could have sold out while I was booking for the rest of us, but fortunately, everything was copacetic.
Step Four - Refining the Where
With travel dates now in hand, I could pull up my "Things to To" document created earlier and work up a draft itinerary, spreading our activities and drives across the time available to us. A few days in abbreviated form would look something like this:
Friday, March 4: AA Flight #123 Arrives OMA 9:45 PM; Car Rental: TBD; Hotel: TBD
Saturday, March 5: To do: old market, KANEKO gallery, Bob Kerry Pedestrian Bridge (spans NE & IA); Drive 4.25 hours to Kansas City; Dinner: Stroud's; Hotel: TBD
Sunday, March 6: To do: Nat'l WWI Museum, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Blue Room Jazz Club; Drive 1 hour to Topeka in PM; Hotel: TBD
Monday, March 7: To do: Brown vs. Board of Education NHS; Drive 4 hours to Tulsa, stopping as possible at Golden Driller roadside attraction; Dinner: Blue Dome District; Hotel: TBD
Step Five - Nailing down the Where
With the itinerary fleshed out, the final step is rental car and hotel booking. Since we're Costco members, we usually use their car rental benefit. We've found the price to be competitive. I just learned about AutoSlash, which lets you reserve a car and then continues to seek lower prices on your behalf up until your day of arrival, which is awesome.
As for hotels, we have certain chains that we like and so I frequently do a quick Google search for "hotels in xyz city" and then look at the resulting map which will show a variety of hotel properties (not all to be sure) for the chains we know. I'll check to see how close they are to the sites we're seeing in the city and look at their Trip Advisor ratings. Sometimes we go with our chosen chain, other times, a highly-ranked Trip Advisor hotel will catch our fancy. I usually book the no-cancellation advanced booking rate to save a few dollars.
Different Trips... Different Planning Processes
This vacation was fairly easy to plan, because our time was prescribed, and we had an agenda (to check a few more states off of our list). Other trip ideas might feel a little more "nebulous", so I'll need to talk to friends or family about their experiences, buy multiple guidebooks, and/or review my collection of travel magazines for relevant articles. For me, either way, it's all about diving in!