Planning a world trip is obviously a daunting task. It usually starts out with a bucket list, and then you start finding more things to do around the bucket list destinations and before you know it, you’ve got yourself a heck of a trip! For us it was that simple so let’s dive in, right away, into how we planned our trip.

Which way to go?

We got the idea from the Round The World trip ticket (read the blog post if you want to know how one works) to just head in one direction and avoid backtracking as much as possible. We thought it would be cool to return to the US through New York city, like so many immigrants who came when North America was first colonized, so we headed west so we could enter the US from the east. But of course, South America is south of us, so we knocked that off first and then started heading west.

Chasing the weather

Mostly because we don’t like extreme weather, hot or cold, and because it makes packing easier, we tried to stay in the nice weather, neither too hot or cold. We were especially worried about certain destinations for which the weather is a big factor in enjoying or just getting there. Weather wise, we worked our trip around our Patagonia, India and Nepal. Secondarily, Egypt & Jordan. If you are wondering what we did when the weather was not so good, checkout our clothes you need to stay warm blog post

Show me the points!

Like we mentioned in our how to afford a trip around the world blog post we hoarded points while we were saving money. When redeeming flights, sometimes you have to book the more desirable flights, waaaaay in advance. This meant that we also had to work our itinerary around those flights. We identified the most expensive legs for our trip and saved points to cover those legs. We are not travel hackers so we mostly focused on accumulating Chase points, Hilton & IHG points. If you are interested in how many points we saved during our trip, check out our a matter of wallets, cards & savings blog post.

These are the places that we worked our itinerary around, everywhere else was pretty flexible.

Save a buck

We targeted the shoulder season mostly because it’s usually less crowded and also more affordable. There were plenty of times we didn’t hit this goal, but it was nice to be shooting for shoulder season because it made some decisions a little easier. Other times we actually were at a destination during the shoulder season and maybe the season was late or had moved up. We froze our booties in New Zealand b/c winter came early and we also froze in Nepal, b/c winter (a different winter) was late. This was less than ideal but we’d still, wholeheartedly, recommend going during the shoulder season, ‘cause you’ll find some really gems like Hanoi in February.

Loosey goosey

Why did we plan so little? We knew that once we were on the road, we’d meet other travelers and gain lots of insights from their travels. We wanted the flexibility to be able to change our plans without having to pay a lot of money. Also, when we say we didn’t plan much in advance, we usually had a couple of months planned ahead, especially for airfare, but definitely no hotels or buses until a few days before that destination.

No pain, no gain

Did this lack of planning burn us? Yes! In Colombia it’s so much easier to fly from big city to big city; it’s also very affordable. If we had planned just a few weeks before, this part of our trip, we definitely would’ve flown instead of taken some very long 12+ hour bus rides. The countryside is beautiful, but you definitely don’t need 12+hrs to enjoy it. On the bright side, Myanmar was very similar (aka 45min flight vs 12hr bus ride) so when we saw this, we jumped at the flights that were still pretty affordable; lesson learned.

To hear us talk about our planning, check us out on YouTube:

What about you? have you ever traveled with very loose plans? share your story in the comments! As always, if you have any questions, please also leave ‘em in the comments below.