BabuSoge

We think of travel as a component of our life journey. It is a means of exploration, a source of memories and experiences, and an opportunity to occasionally do something different from our everyday routines. For us, it feeds back positively into our lives and helps us become better at what we do.

We find planning a trip as joyful an experience as the trip itself, and that is because we like our discussions and back and forth on several aspects that we discuss below. Ultimately, we adjust and mostly align ourselves on the goals of our trip.

To spend or not to spend: Needless to say, this is a top priority. Money doesn’t grow on trees, and as high as a place may be on our bucket lists, we don’t have an endless amount to spend on a trip. We budget for travel as a part of our monthly expenses and make sure to stick to it. We plan the trip expenses and divide it up between several months — such as booking flights one month, booking accommodation the next, activities a little later, and so on. For trips during peak travel times such as the long summer weekends/ Christmas break, we plan 6 months out so we can lock in the prices for flights and accommodation when they are reasonable. Often, we prefer Airbnb/condos over hotel rooms, as they tend to be cheaper overall and allow us to cook our meals — a significant cost-cutting measure for us. Moreover, we find that eating out every day on a long vacation gets boring very quickly. We take some supplies with us, and we buy the rest from grocery stores during our vacation.

Off late, a small percentage of our travel budget has come from credit card points/miles but for most expenses, we just end up paying costs out of pocket. In the future, this may hopefully change to spending less cash directly out of pocket, as well as occasionally being able to undertake aspirational/luxury travel via points/miles, etc. For now, we book the cheapest available economy tickets, stay mostly at Airbnb and use our budget for activities and experiences.

We will link to any rewards that we found helpful and if we do use points or sign-up bonuses or any deals to fund our trip we will make a note of it in our posts.

How many days? : As employees with non-remote 9–5 pm kind of jobs, we have a limited number of vacation days in a year. Three weeks of holidays can be stretched to around ~30 days when combined with weekends and long weekends. Traveling during long weekends is a double-edged sword — it can help us maximize the number of vacation days, but costs and crowds are substantially higher. For every vacation we take, we deliberate on the best strategy — sometimes it’s nice to travel in the shoulder season/off-season, and the other times we choose to navigate our way through the crowds and combat higher costs by planning far out in advance. For destinations more than a few hours away by road (6 hours is about the maximum we are willing to drive), we prefer to fly to minimize our travel times and spend more time at the destination- thereby allowing us to take fewer days off from work per trip. We also typically max out our allowed vacation days every year.

We take several short trips (at most 7 days) in a year. We don’t feel like we have to absolutely see and do everything in one trip. We could always go back to a region if need be to visit places we may have missed previously. There is after all so much to see and so many new experiences to be had!

Managing expectations: Every place is different, from museums to natural wonders, there is a huge spectrum of things to do at a particular destination. Both of us are not very interested in museums, art, history, and the like and prefer to be amidst nature. We have a particular fondness for hiking and mountains rather than beaches/wildlife. That is not to say, we don’t visit cities and beaches — we definitely do but then we make it a point to tailor our trip to mix it up and do other types of activities too. And we often limit our time exploring art and history.

It is important to keep expectations in check. On one hand, it increases the excitement for a trip, and on the other, it can lead to disappointment if things don’t work out. Regardless of the activities we choose to do, we go into it fully knowing that it can go either way — blow us away completely, or be an underwhelming experience. On certain occasions, weather, flight delays, traffic, local disturbances, etc. can impede a trip and cause unexpected delays and cancellations. It is important to have a backup plan/ or be prepared to do fewer things in such cases. While it is disappointing to have plans modified, it helps to move on quickly and enjoy as much as possible.

Relax at the pool? Probably not: Vacation means different things for everyone. We think of vacations as an opportunity to experience new things and visit new places. Our vacations are typically packed days — with us leaving our place of stay around 8/9 am and returning in the evening/night. We don’t like to sit around and chill in the pool/BBQ etc during the day. And for this reason, also, we prefer to book an Airbnb instead of a resort hotel. There are occasions where we may book 1–2 nights at a resort with the sole aim of staying in and enjoying the resort facilities, but such instances are few and far in between, and definitely in places such where the currency/costs are more favorable compared to the US.

In cities where public transport is available, we use them instead of renting cars/using Uber.

Final thoughts: The very first travel article we write on our blog, we thought, should explicitly lay out our travel philosophy. As much as this is important for readers of the blog to understand why and how we make the choices we make, it is also helpful for us to have a philosophy that serves as groundwork for our decisions, as travel planning can often get out of hand quickly.

We should also mention that this philosophy is not set in stone and we can definitely envision this changing with our changing priorities as we grow older (and hopefully wiser!). More than anything, if one day we happen to come back and read this article, it will most certainly bring back a ton of memories from all of our travel and travel planning.