All in Planning
After you have your passport and have made the 3 Big Decisions and before you start charting where you’ll spend your time and picking hotels, pull the trigger and book your flights. “But I need to figure out all the other details first,” you say. “Pish posh,” I reply with an English accent, “we’re planning not dreaming.”
If you’ve got your passport and the travel bug is biting, you may be tempted to start booking hotels. WAIT! If you don’t want to go back to the drawing board with each decision you make, you need to build your trip a solid foundation. The way to do that is by thinking through your 3 biggest decisions.
64% of Americans don’t have a passport and if I had to take a guess, it’s a big part of what holds them back from planning a dream trip. A lot of people never get a passport because they don’t have any immediate plans to leave the country. But when the idea of an amazing international trip pops up in their head and gives their heart a flutter, they immediately write it off because they don’t have a passport.
After a long flight from Geneva, Switzerland to Phoenix, Arizona, I stood at the baggage claim anxious to see how many thousands of dollars of damage I had done to everyone else’s luggage. We had picked up six bottles of local wine in Annecy, France and made the ridiculous gamble of wrapping it up in our clothes and crossing our fingers that it would make it home.
Travelers and Rewards Programs are forever tied together. So, whether you rake in your points with a gleeful smile or begrudging scowl, you can’t pass up the freebies travel companies throw at you for your loyalty.
A lot of people have been talking about changes to the EU law that will require US citizens to be pre-screened before being allowed to travel to Europe (starting in 2021). Instead of just jumping off the plane and rolling into the country, you’ll have to go online before your trip and apply.
Today, right now, the very moment you’re reading this, the world is more accessible than it has been throughout history. You can see and do more, relative to your economic situation, than anyone in the generations that preceded you.
