My travel planning cheat sheet

In my 11 year relationship with my boyfriend, we have gone on many trips - from Nicaragua in our earliest years together, to Italy where we ate our faces off, and throughout multiple areas of Spain to endlessly tapas hop and drink all of the Rioja. All but one of the trips we’ve taken were planned ENTIRELY by me.

I’m not bragging about this. I just happen to be planner and my boyfriend is not. Usually, I will leave him with one task, like booking the rental car. On our most recent trip to Mallorca, he didn’t remember to do it and we were stuck with a manual car on the steepest, scariest mountain of all time. It’s hard to take in the beautiful scenery when you’re scared for your life.

I thought it could be helpful to share the tools and resources I regularly rely on to make trip planning easier. Keeping track of everything from luggage fees to siesta closings can feel overwhelming. Here’s how to make it totally doable:

Research

Sites like Trip Advisor are helpful when comparing hotels, but I also like to look at Travel & Leisure and the NY Times Travel feature of 36 hours in a given city. Often, I will find one or two common hotels among these and choose from those. I also do old fashion Google searches for “boutique hotels”. We like to stay at hotels that feel culturally tied to the city and found a great one in Mexico City from a basic web search.

For food and restaurant planning, I always check out Food & Wine, the sites mentioned above, and I look for featured chefs who have visited the city and listed their favorites. A great example of this is when we went to Puerto Rico, I watched a YouTube episode of José Andrés (a famous D.C. chef) as he toured areas of PR and ate at his favorite spots. This helped me find the amazing José Enrique in Sartunce - and one of the best fish dishes of my life.

I use Google Flights as my first stop for every trip I plan. Once I find a few options, I double check it against Kayak and the airline to make sure prices are consistent. Most importantly: I always book through the airline. It just makes life so much easier if you need to make changes or try to get two seats together with your bestie, BF, whoever.

Travel Tools & Apps

Keeping track of all the deets (think flight #s, hotel addresses, web links) is so much less tedious if you keep a Google sheet and adjust it regularly as you plan. I have the Google Sheet app on my phone - this way I can always pull it up (wireless or not) to reference specifics in one place. Don’t forget to keep a tab that is solely expenses! This is crucial and will make sure you don’t go way over your travel budget. Bonus perk: this is easy to share with any travel companions without having multiple documents.

I’m sure you’ve all heard of Evernote, the note-taking app that lets you create “notebooks”. What I find most useful about this tool is being able to combine pictures with short-form notes that are easy to look up when walking around a new city. My pro tip is that I take pictures of pages from hard copy tour books so that I don’t have to carry around anything but my phone. This is a game changer because I still love those books and can have the best of both worlds.

Hope you found these travel tips helpful! Leave a comment or DM me with your top tips.

Pásalo bien!