Planning and booking your holidays can be one of the most stressful things to do. There’s so much to think about. Like when to travel? How to find the cheapest deals? where you should go? Etc,
This is where these travel resources come into it. All of these tools help us, from the planning stage, to the moment we leave to go on holiday.
So, to take some of that pressure off, then check out these all-important tools, to help you plan and book your next budget holiday.
Many of these tools are free, unless otherwise stated.
Travel planning
This is the most important part and that’s the planning stage. If you don’t plan your holiday, you won’t know where to go, how much it will cost you! Which will leave you out of pocket and you may not enjoy the trip.
Here are our favourite tools to help you plan your next holiday.
Free Travel planner
We’ve created this product to help with the planning stages of your holiday.
It is completely FREE; all you do is enter your name and email address and we will send you the free travel planner via email. Then just print as many copies as you need and complete it as you plan your holiday.
What’s included in the free travel planner?
- Destination information – where you’re planning to visit and notes you might want to make
- Itinerary – dates of travel, activity, hotel, transportation
- Planner – where to eat, when to travel, places to shop, budget you’ll set
- Budget tracker
- Flight information – add details of your flights
- Packing list – that way you’ll never miss a thing
- Journal – write a travel journal for each day
- Expenses tracker – so you can keep to your budget
- Notes – a chance to write some notes as you plan your trip
This all-important travel planner has everything you need to plan your next holiday
Pinterest is your friend when it comes to planning your holiday. AND it’s a completely free tool!
Pinterest class themselves as an image based Social Media network, but is it really? How social can you be on Pinterest?
It’s certainly not like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc, but it is one of the best places to research and plan your next holiday.
It’s a great place to obtain inspiration, whether you need inspiration on your next travel adventure, interior design, food recipes, you name it, Pinterest covers it.
But what is so great about Pinterest?
Well, the main thing is that you can save something to a board that you can refer back to another time.
So, let’s say we are planning our next adventure to London.
If we go to Google and type in Things to do in London, or maybe we are looking for a specific itinerary as we don’t want to do too much planning, we just want something we can follow.
Once we have found the best London Itinerary, now what do we do to refer back to it later? We can’t save it somewhere, we can’t download it, but we have found the best itinerary.
This is where Pinterest is great.
We would create a specific board for travel to London (so we can refer back to it later). We would then search Things to do in London, or London itineraries. We’ve found a really good post, now we’ll just save this to our adventures in London board.
We can now refer back to this post at a later date. We just look through the board, click that great article we found, before planning our trip.
If you need inspiration on your next travel adventure and want to save our post for later, then join us on Pinterest. Yes, you can follow us and you can save as many of our posts to one of your boards.
We have also saved our fellow travellers articles to our boards, to help us plan our next big adventure.
Now that you have some ideas saved to your London travel board, you can complete the travel planner you downloaded from us, as you research and pin through Pinterest.
Tools to use to book your holiday on a budget
Now that you have done your planning through the above tools, now it’s time to purchase your accommodation, flights, exhibition tickets and more. We have you covered with these useful tools.
Booking.com
One of our favourite tools to use for researching and booking accommodation.
Booking.com offer competitive accommodation rates around the world. You can book hostels, B&Bs, budget friendly hotels or luxury 5* hotels through their website.
You can research where to stay in the selected location, compare prices, the location, reviews and facilities before making that final decision and booking your stay.
When you’re ready to book your stay, then just complete the below details.
Booking.comSkyscanner
Another great tool to help plan and book flights.
Skyscanner not only offers great rates on flights, but on accommodation and car hire.
This is our go to tool to book our flights.
It’s simple, we just enter the departing airport and arrival airport, select the dates and number of passengers. Skyscanner then reveals all the deals.
You can choose the cheapest flights and airlines, how many stop overs or direct flights.
Once you have found the best deal for you, just click the purchase link, complete the passengers’ details and the flights are booked with just a click of the button. It’s that simple and easy.
Skyscanner is so easy to navigate, that we could not live without it.
Get Your Guides
An excellent tool to book day trips, tickets and excursions.
We used Get Your Guides to book our bus from Krakow to Auschwitz-Birkenau, we will use them to book a Jack the Ripper London Walking Tour and for other upcoming events.
The purchasing of tickets makes travelling easier and simpler. It is just a click of the button, pay for the tickets. The tickets are then sent via email and off you go.
Before any purchases, we always check the reviews and what services they offer.
This is a must tool to use to help you have a smooth and easy holiday.
Show Around
This is an undiscovered tool that was recommended to us by another traveller.
Locals sign up to be tour guides in their own cities, towns and villages. Offering a wealth of knowledge of the area and taking you to many of the highlights in their town. Some charge a fee but many offer their tours for free.
You might want to discover less tourist spots in a country or city, then this is the great way to dive straight into the culture.
Show Around is a great way to travel on a budget, dive right into the culture and discover places that other tourists haven’t seen.
We have signed up to be tour guides in our local seaside town of Hastings. Famous for the battle of Hastings, in 1066.
We offer knowledgeable information about the history of the town, from castles, smugglers to a fishing town. And we offer our tours completely FREE.
You could also become a tour guide in your local area offering the same services in return.
If you would like to book our tour, then please follow the link to our profile to learn more.
Conclusion
We use these tools ourselves to plan and finally book our holiday. It’s so useful to help us stay on a budget too.
We hope you find these tools useful when planning and booking your holiday.
Another tool we haven’t mentioned is social media. Joining Facebook Groups and pages, where you can search for information or post a question that the rest of the group can assist with, will also be useful when planning and booking a holiday.
You can join our Facebook page, where we share our latest posts, it’s a community where you can post any question and either we or a member can help you out.