When it comes to our trips, Han’s a “big picture” kind of guy while I am the planner. He’ll pick the place and may mention some of the activities he wants to do and I do my best to make them happen. As a result, when it comes to planning our trips, he pretty much gives me the reigns to choose things such as the lodging, reserve any rental carfare, etc.
There are some things that we do to save money each trip, but once the trip is booked and planned, there are some applications we use to choose everything from the places we visit to the food we eat. Here are the tools we utilize when planning our trips.
INSTAGRAM:
Believe it or not, Instagram is one of the applications we use for getting ideas for places to eat and things to do while planning trips. We’ll search for certain hashtags that are based in the areas we’re planning to travel and see where people are going for things like coffee, food, and museums. It’s a great tool to use because once you find a photograph of a particular location or restaurant you can save it. In fact, one of the ways we found out about Ceremony Coffee Roasters was by looking through the #baltimorecoffee tag and then saving it to our account so we’d remember it once we finalized our plans. We also found one of the prettiest coffee shops we’ve visited, Felix Roasting Co on Instagram as well.
(Related Post – Ceremony Coffee Roasters)
PINTEREST:
Pinterest is another tool we use when planning our trips because it’s a great place to access different reviews in one place. As with Instagram, I’ll search for different keywords based on different locations or once we’ve found a place we’re interested in, I’ll scout Pinterest to see if anyone’s actually visited and see what their reviews are before we add it to our itinerary. Most of the time, the reviews you find include photographs that are really helpful when you’re looking to get an idea of what to expect while there.
TRIP ADVISOR:
Trip Advisor is my go-to for reviews for hotels and inns. In fact, Trip Advisor was the application we used when booking our honeymoon in Annapolis. One of the things we look for when looking for inns and hotels to stay in is what the traveler photographs look like and what their reviews of the place are. Sites like Trip Advisor are a great place to do so. It also has a feature where you can save experiences and restaurants to your travel lists so you can keep track of the places you want to visit while there.
YOUTUBE:
YouTube is Han’s favorite application to utilize when we’re planning trips. Usually, this is how he gets his ideas of places we’d like to travel either for a day trip or for a longer stay. For example, our trip to New Haven happened because he did some research and showed me a few YouTube videos which then resulted in me doing my own web-sleuthing of some of the places. YouTube is a great application to go to for reviews because oftentimes people are recording their reviews of different places and things in vlog format. It’s also a great place to go if you’re stuck on day-trip itineraries or ideas of what you can do while there.
Those are some of our favorite tools to use for planning our trips. If you want to know how we go about saving money for our trips, you’ll love this resource we have provided for free online! Now let’s hear from you!
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What are your favorite tools to use for planning trips?
