Many of us love the idea of travelling. Whether it’s a day trip to the next city, a weekend away, or a long overseas trip, the thought of being away, hopefully relaxing also besides exploring, brings joyful feelings inside.
While I have always enjoyed the pre-trip planning process, I know many don’t. Many don’t know where to start and even when one does, she often can still feel overwhelmed with all the choices and uncertainties of a new place. This is where my FREE trip planning course can come in handy!
Background Story
A couple of weeks ago I decided that one day I want to go back to becoming an instructional technologist again – ideally at a university. If you’re not familiar with this field, an instructional technologist is a person that would often be asked to the software research, the testing, doing and also the training.
Let’s use Instagram as an example. I would research it, not so much algorithm but how the piece of technology can be used in a learning environment. Then I would test to see if it would actually work – I’d work with a subject matter expert (SME) and test to see if Instagram can be a great tool to help students learn the subject.
If yes, I’d teach the faculty how to use IG and if I need to, do other tech work related to it (I may, for example, have to grab the API to connect the platform to the learning management system – LMS – or faculty website).
While I don’t need to have a course in my portfolio (since my goal is to be a technologist and not be a course designer), I need to know how to work the LMS. So having videos and other pieces included within a course makes my portfolio look better and in my CV I can say I know how to use this and that LMS with this and that tool.
45-min Mini-Course on the Basics of Trip Planning
Without further ado, if you are one of those who are either new to trip planning or anxious about it, I have for you a FREE 45-min mini-course on “Basic Trip Planning”. Just click the image below and you’ll be on your way!
The mini-course will cover
- Rome2rio: Apps download
- Skyscanner: Apps download
- Booking.com: Apps download
- GoogleMaps: iOS Android
- ViaMichelin: iOS Android
A small catch, since I am currently not monetising from my blog, I only have a free Teachable account. Due to this, only a max of 10 students can enrol. If by chance many of you want to give the course a go and it’s full, let me know. I’ll give those who enrol about two weeks and then I’ll kick them out if they haven’t unenrolled themselves. This way new students can enrol. Thank you for your understanding and I’ll work on an e-book version of the course.
To my readers who have better things to do than spend 45-min listening to me talk, let me give you a quick summary of the basic of trip planning…
If you have been following me on Instagram, most of you would know that I rarely have a certain destination in mind. I often just wing it or I use the help of Skyscanner “Everywhere” and booking/AirBnB’s map features to help me choose. I used to have certain places I must go to but I think after living in Europe for almost 10-years, all my bucket list places have been ticked off and I am now operating on bonuses.
For those who have a certain destination in mind, let’s say a week trip to Paris and London or two weeks exploring Italy, what you need to do to move on to the next big steps are to figure out:
- How to get there
- Where to stay
- What to see and where to eat
But before you get to those three, you need to make sure you know:
- Who all are going and what the age ranges are
- When you will be going
- What you want to experience
- How much your budget is
I call those four “The Big Four”.
The big four you need to answer first, ideally in that order, because there is a minor domino effect to each question.
The who will affect the when. Let’s say there are school-age children in the group. This will limit when you go… unless it’s ok to pull the kids out of school. If your 80-yrs-old grandma is also going, how mobile is she? If she’s not that mobile and your kids are preschool/kindergarten ages, then you will need to not pack too much in one day and include activities that will be memorable for the whole family. This then will lead to the budget.
Plane tickets for four in March can be quite a bit lower than tickets in July. A room for all or will you need to book two rooms? When to start saving and how much?
See the domino effect I mentioned?
One thing I forgot to mention in the course is how to estimate the daily cost. So let me do that here…
What I usually do is go on to Google Maps and go to the city/town/village that I will be in. Once there, I would type in “cafe and restaurants” and I’ll have choices. I’ll look at the photos of places that not only have the dishes we like but also have good reviews. If the photos look nice, I’ll see if it has a “menu” photo. If not, I’ll see if the place has a website and on that website, a menu.
I’ll do this for a couple of places to get a good grasp of how much food costs there and do some maths. My maths look something like this…
Food
Breakfast at the apartment = €10 (me cooking and everything purchased from the grocery store). Lunch = €50 (for all four of us). Dinner = €15 (me cooking at the apartment). Ice cream, street food, coffee etc = €25.
More often than not, we eat out only for lunch. It’s cheaper and sometimes we even have leftovers, which we later finish at dinnertime.
Food total = €100
Transport and sites
Public transport-related stuff and fee-paying sites.
Since we often only do one paysite the whole trip, or max one a day, and walk as much as possible
This total = €50
Misc
This would be souvenirs and who knows what Jovie and Emma see along the way. Or, maybe it started raining hard and I forgot to pack an umbrella. This happened to us before and we had to buy two. Another time, one of the kids forgot a jumper and the weather got cold. That’s how we ended up with an “I Love Paris” overpriced hoodie.
Misc total = €50
Adding all that up, €200/day is how much I need to add into the flight and lodging cost.
If the trip is a 14-days trip, the flight is €2500, lodging is €1200 then the approximate grand total cost would be €6500.
This mini-course is what I want to share today and I hope to share many more tutorials and whatever research findings I may have whilst I practice using different tools.
I would appreciate the feedback and if I should do more courses or stick to blogging 😜
Have a great one!
PS:
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