It’s taken a while to figure out what the second installment of How To Solo Female Travel should be but watching my parents take over an hour to book flights to Copenhagen made me realise – it’s how to plan your trip.
Where are you going?
Maybe you already know where you want to go. My parents have been talking about Copenhagen for about ten years and now they’re finally going to do it. I’m trying to figure out dates to go to Croatia and I’m figuring out right now precisely which bit/s I want to go to.
Maybe you don’t know where you want to go. Well, what are you after from this trip? Cheap sunshine? Adventure? A city break? Backpacking the world? Once you’ve fixed on that bit, you can narrow down the destination/s. Because you don’t have to stick to just one place. Maybe you want to go to two or more places in the same country. Maybe you can hop from one country to another. Maybe you’re planning an epic trip taking in as many countries as you can afford. It’s your trip. I’ll be saying that a lot. There’s only so much concrete planning advice I can give when every person and every trip is so dramatically different.
When are you going?
This will make a difference. If you’re planning a ski holiday, you need to go when there’s good snow. If you’re planning a beach holiday, you need to go when it’s going to be sunny. Have you got plans and commitments to fit this around? Are you doing a long weekend or a year or two? When are the cheapest flights available? Looking into Croatia, I’m surprised to find the most expensive flights are on Tuesday, which I wouldn’t expect. Does your accommodation operate on a “changeover day” where you have to arrive and leave on particular days? Does a rainy season or a dry season factor into any of this?
For my Croatia trip, I’m trying to fit it into May. August is too hot for me but any earlier than May will run into my evening classes and some social stuff. I’m factoring in a Saturday day trip, trying not to miss two Brownie meetings in a row and also being back before I’m due to go off camping on Exmoor. That leaves me a period of eighteen days to fit the trip into but it’ll realistically have to be the second half because of Brownies. And then there will things like what days flights are running between various cities. But it’ll be May, so it’ll be very warm, by my polar bear standards, but still fairly early in the tourist season so I’ll have to bear in mind the vague possibility that things won’t be open for the summer yet. Someone else might decide August works better for them. When is definitely something to think about just as much as where.
Make sure everything lines up before you start pressing go
I would generally make sure that my flight and accommodation are both available and both at a suitable price before I start booking anything. No point in having a flight if there’s nowhere to stay the first few nights, or nowhere within your budget. Of course, this may not be relevant. I’ve done trips to Iceland where I’ve had the flight there and back booked and a car or bus passport but no real idea where I’m going to be day-to-day. However, because this is Iceland in summer, I’m assuming hotels and guesthouses will often be booked up or too expensive if I turn up on the day so I take a tent with me. Campsites are always available and pretty cheap and then I’ve got the option to stay under a solid roof if a good deal turns up. If you’re backpacking, you might be turning up in a new place on any day and finding a hostel. I’ve never backpacked but my understanding is that there’s usually space for one more and if there isn’t, there’s usually another hostel not too far away and backpacking almost always seems to work on spontaneity.
Where should I stay?
Some of this is covered in the previous question. Where do you want to stay? What’s your budget? Do you want to be right in the thick of it or would you prefer somewhere quieter and further out? Hostel or hotel? Guesthouse or B&B? Campsite? Apartment? Full board or self-catering? Once you’ve got an idea of the type of accommodation you’d like, you can look at what you can get for your budget. Take my parents’ trip to Copenhagen again. They like boring chain hotels and they especially like an Ibis. That’s partly why they’ve taken so long to book this trip, there’s no Ibis in Copenhagen. So they’re looking for something that’s similarly-priced and with similar levels of basic but clean comfort. And they want somewhere reasonably central.
I’ve often settled for whatever I can find that’s really cheap within a five minute walk of the station and that’s landed me in some really terrible hotels, the sort my mum would avert her eyes from in the street and would never enter. On the other hand, I once went to Paris and opted for… ok, it was an Ibis, right down in the south, two streets off the Peripherique. Perfectly acceptable hotel, nice and cheap because of the relatively remote location but you do have to tolerate taking a tram to the nearest metro station and then a longish trip back into the centre. There are so many options and so many potential compromises and it depends on what you want and what you’re willing to pay.
And what is included in the rate? My parents found a hotel that suited their taste and budget but discovered that their room didn’t include breakfast. Normally that would be fine and they’d just get juice, coffee and croissants somewhere up the road but they’re going with my sister and her room includes breakfast. So rather than pay for eight breakfasts for them, they’ve upgraded to a room that does include breakfast and also has guaranteed great views. I like a nice view but I’d never consider paying for it. I’ll eat the hotel breakfast if it’s included but I won’t often add it and again, I wouldn’t upgrade for it. But you might. That might be a thing that works for you.
How much luggage can I take?
That depends on your airline and your ticket. If you’ve already booked, check it carefully. If you haven’t, give it a think before you book. Budget airlines give you as little as possible for free but easyJet, at least, is encouraging you to bring hold luggage instead of cabin luggage. A 15kg hold bag is cheaper than a 10kg cabin bag, for example, and it has no size restrictions, as long as it’s within weight. My parents have opted for the free small bag for their Copenhagen trip plus one 23kg suitcase between the three of them, which should allow them to take as much as they could possibly want and seems to be the cheapest way to achieve that (my mum will pack her backpack until she can hardly lift it and then she’ll fill her handbag, knowing that the handbag must go in the backpack when she reaches the departure gate but she still won’t leave room for it).
Small cheat: wear that small handbag or bumbag or whatever under your jumper or coat. What the airline can’t see, it can’t protest. Don’t do this at security! They don’t care how many bags you’re trying to take on the plane but they do care deeply about you trying to hide things from them.
You’ll find a lot of people on the internet who’ll advocate hand luggage only. In this particular case, that isn’t the cheap way to go but it’s the easiest because your luggage is with you at all times. It’s almost impossible for it to get lost along the way and you don’t have to wait at baggage reclaim when you land. On the other hand, I’m getting worse at packing hand luggage only by the day. I did it on my six-day three-city trip to Denmark in 2012 but I think I’d really struggle with it today. Come to that, I did it for my three-week Russia trip in 2019 and I did struggle – see picture below!
Another small tip: I sometimes ask at check-in how much it would cost to put my free hand luggage in the hold. It won’t always work but airlines know that the cabin is overcrowded and sometimes they’ll let you do it for free. In that case, have a small bag handy for decanting important things like wallets, documents and electronics. We did this on a family trip to Cyprus and I felt like the proper professional traveller for having my tiny folding Ikea backpack and my important stuff right on top of my suitcase. In fact, maybe you should consider something like this anyway: put the big case in the overhead locker and pop out the little bag on the top that contains your phone, headphones, eye mask, whatever you’ll want while you’re in the air. No muss, no fuss. For me, I sometimes find it more convenient to not carry a fairly heavy cabin bag around the airport and then deal with it on the plane. Your mileage may vary.
What should I pack?
Oh, I have no idea. That so depends on your trip. Swimwear for your beach trip, warm clothes for your ski trip, comfortable shoes for your city break. Google it, you’ll find someone has done a blog or a packing video to give you inspiration, whatever the trip.
What I would say is try to pack as lightly as possible. Whatever you’ve ended up paying for luggage on the plane, you’re going to have to carry it yourself at some point and it’s so much easier if it’s not a back-breaking weight. It’s also easier to get everything back in at the end, especially when you’ve added souvenirs or whatever shopping you might have done along the way.
Consider a suitcase with wheels vs a backpack. It feels easier to pull along a suitcase but you wait until you meet cobbles or steps. Make it a backpack if you’re camping: wheels don’t get on with mud or groundsheets. Also, airlines are much more likely to weigh or measure a suitcase if you’re trying to take it into a cabin. I’ve carried a large backpack on board without even blinking, straight past staff who are measuring suitcases that are visibly and obviously smaller than my backpack. Be careful about sizes and weights with budget airlines in particular – if your case is too big, they’ll take it off you, put it in the hold and charge you an extortionate amount for it there and then. It’s almost always cheaper to book your hold luggage in advance if you want extra.
What should I do while I’m there?
Again, this is entirely up to you and your trip. Swim in the sea, take a day trip, go to a museum, spend your evenings drinking cocktails, whatever you like. I would go with a list of things I’d like to do and then every day I’ll get up and see whether anything is shouting to me particularly loudly today or whether the weather is going to decide for you. That way I have enough of a plan that the infinite possibilities don’t feel overwhelming, or that I just don’t know what there is to do, but it’s not so much of a plan that I feel stuck in it.
Sometimes you’ll have something that’s firmly scheduled in. Maybe you’ve booked a day tour to somewhere interesting. Maybe you’ve decided on your long weekend in Paris to spend a day at Disney – I think you don’t need to book in advance but I would personally. If you’re visiting multiple places, maybe you’ll have a firm date for moving on. When I went to Russia, I had a timetable in the front of my little notebook, which was colour-coded by city and had my flight or train times written in there. Those were firm and immovable and I knew there were certain things I wanted to see in four of the five cities but I mostly let them float into place.
One thing I’d recommend at least thinking about is making plans for your first evening. I’m inclined to arrive, settle down, get some food and do nothing that first night. And that’s fine. I do that more often than not. But if you’ve got something already planned, you do feel like you’re properly on holiday because you’ve already started doing the things. When I went to Rome, I dumped my stuff on my bed and went straight out to the Vatican evening, when I figured I could see the Sistine Chapel surrounded by mere hundreds of people instead of thousands. It worked well. I dread to think what it would be like during the day but there was pretty much no need at all to queue to get in.
But how do I know what I can do?
I’m going to answer this one a bit backwards. I used to do a certain amount of pre-reading and then just keep it in my head, or I would flick through the guidebook when I got there. When I went to Russia, it was five cities and three weeks and I couldn’t do that so I had a tiny notebook and I kept about four pages per city and wrote down anything that looked interesting and their nearest metro station, if that was relevant.
These days I’ve been sucked into the Notion thing and I keep a page per country that I’ve got vague plans of visiting. So, for Croatia, I have a few notes I’ve picked up here and there but the main feature is a small table. If I see anything I might be interested in, I write down what it is, where it is and a note about why I’m interested. I probably won’t visit all of them but it forms something of a vague to-do list. Right now, it’s very vague – four items so far.
Where do I get the stuff to put in there? Ah, that’s the first half of this question.
I like guidebooks, personally. I know they’re out of date on the subjects of things like hotels, restaurants and buses almost before they’re published but they’re still good for bigger picture – major landmarks, things to see and do, day trips I could make a little further afield, that sort of thing. So I’ll probably look through the guidebook and note down anything that catches my eye. In the case of my Croatia trip, maybe I’ll see that 50% of my list is in one city or region and then I’ll decide I’d better include that city or region in my trip.
The other place is obviously the internet! Most of what’s in my Croatia table at the moment came from Karl Watson’s new video last week and I’m watching other people’s Medsailors vlogs too. When I’ve actually booked it, I’ll start filling that table in earnest with lots more vlogs and blogs. There’s nothing quite like someone’s personal experience to tell you whether you’re actually interested in the thing you might have spotted in your guidebook or heard Is A Thing. For example, you’ll hear people everywhere telling you you have go to the Louvre while you’re in Paris. Great, add that to the list. But if art museums bore you to death, maybe skip it. Then again, art museums bore me to death and I’d still highly recommend the Hermitage in St Petersburg. (Well, I don’t recommend it right now. Russia is not our friend right now. I’ll be as anti-Putin as anyone but I’m not yet ready for the anti-Russia feeling to match my grandparents’ generation’s anti-Germany feeling. This is Putin, not Russia, just as it was Nazis, not Germany. There are plenty of Russians who don’t want this any more than the rest of us and one day we’ll be helping to rebuild Russia and our international friendship without Herr Putin. Please.)
Do I need to have everything written down?
No, not if you don’t want to. I just find it easier if I can see everything, at least while I’m in the planning stages. You definitely don’t need to take it with you. I have a travel pouch in which I keep my documents and there’s a really cute personalised notebook in there which is usually more than enough for the half-a-page of notes I might need while I’m away. More often than not, I don’t even bother with that. It was only the Russia trip, which featured six flights, two trains, four hotels and two apartments, when I did want it all written down and in my hand for easy reference.
Also, if you’re depending on electronics, keep in mind that batteries die and phones get dropped in water occasionally. Keep it all on your phone, by all means, but I like to have paper copies in the pouch just in case. It’s also easier to shove a printed hotel booking at your taxi driver when you can’t pronounce the address than to hand over your phone.
What if I change my mind about my plans?
Well, that’s one of the beauties of solo travel. You can do what you want. If you’ve made a list of things to do and when you get there, you decide you don’t want to do any of it, you don’t have to. Throw the plans out and do what appeals to you. You can do this with a group as well but it’s so much easier if you’re on your own.
And you see, if you haven’t made any plans and you’re just walking around with a list, it’s not as if you’re actually changing your plan. It’s fine if you do have a plan and you change it. It’s your trip. There’s no one following you around with a clipboard to tell you you’re doing it wrong or you’re running late (unless you’re catching a plane or maybe train). Maybe there’s just some gem you’ve never heard of – do it! Maybe that amazing thing doesn’t look so amazing up close. I keep intending to go to Notre Dame – well, I did – but every time I get there, I find a queue half a mile long and abandon that plan again.
You’re allowed to change your mind – and that applies to more than just travel plans. Enid Blyton wrote an entire boarding school story on the subject of whether it’s feeble or strong to publicly change your mind. I reckon there are a few voters in my country who could do with reading it.
It’s even ok to decide you don’t want to be there at all. As Captain Awkard says, sometimes the cheapest way to pay for something is with money. There might be times when it’s better for you to take the hit on the flight and accommodation cost and go home rather than stay and be miserable. And that’s fine. It’s your trip and you’re allowed to decide you don’t want to do it after all.
Any questions? Leave me a comment. Happy planning!