The hardest part about getting away, whether over a long weekend or on a two-week European excursion, is making the plans. Booking hotel rooms. Planning must-see sites. Divvying up the expenses. It’s a lot to get done.
Getting everything organized for a trip is where I struggle. I have a bad habit of procrastinating planning. I have this irrational fear that I’m going to pick a bad hotel or not do enough research to find good sightseeing opportunities, so I put off getting started.
It also doesn’t help when I don’t have a good way of organizing. I’ve used everything from Word® documents to Excel® spreadsheets to a folder in my email to organize trips. None of which work well for this purpose.
The best method I’ve ever used is this travel planning board, made from craft paper and Post-it® notes, which I hung on the wall. While fun, this method had its downsides. I couldn’t access it away from my house and it was a pain to make changes.
When planning a two-week vacation to England, France and Wales in July, I found an amazingly better option. I used Travefy, a free online and mobile group planner.
It helped me not procrastinate…mostly.
The premise behind Travefy is that it makes trip planning with your friends easy. You can all collaborate to organize the trip, build an itinerary and easily split expenses. And you can do it all on the Travfy website or on its mobile app.
My twin sister and I mainly used the itinerary builder feature of Travefy to plan our trip. It’s really easy-to-use. You just input the location and the dates of your trip and start creating your itinerary for each day.
Keeping track of our flight information, hotel names and booking dates, and the sights we wanted to see was so much easier all in one place. I even shared the link to our Travefy trip with my mom, so she could see our itinerary. (And so, she didn’t ask me a billion questions about where we’d be and when.)
You can even create a PDF to share your itinerary or sync your itinerary to your calendar with just a couple clicks.
At some point I’d like to explore the other features Travefy offers, such as the ability to split group trip expenses. I believe you can even add your bank account, a debit card or a credit card to your Travefy account, and then you can pay your friends directly through Travefy. So easy!
I highly recommend trying Travefy, but no matter what method you choose to plan your trip, travel planning is always better with beer. (Just sayin.)
If you’re wondering why I’m deviating from my usual home decorating and craft posts, the answer is simple. In order to appreciate home, I think you have to get away from it once in a while. Even if it’s just taking a day trip and driving to a different town an hour away. Stepping outside of the everyday is important for all of us. It gives us a fresh perspective and a new appreciation for what we have.
Related articles:
Travel Planning Board
Missouri Travel Series: The Start
Weekend in St. Louis
