Madolyn Thinks

I decided towards the end of last year that I wanted to set myself a travel challenge for 2020. I love to travel, and with work commitments and moving to London, I wasn’t able to do as half as much as I wanted to in 2019. 

I wanted to make sure this year that I put myself and my goals to the front of my focus. There isn’t often a time in life that you can put yourself first one hundred percent, and so I wanted to take advantage of this and tick a lot of things off my wish list. 

My travel challenge/goal for 2020 is to visit 12 different places in 12 months. I know that this is a lot, both financially and time-wise, especially with me still working full time and now living in London. But I have been sensible and organised with my planning, and so I thought that I would share some of my top tips, and things that I have done to make this goal achievable. 

One of the first things I did at the beginning of the year was sit down and make a list of all of the places that I wanted to travel to. Although this may not be a concrete set of travel destinations, it got me thinking about where I wanted to go, and helped me to figure out when would be the best time to visit throughout the year. For example, I knew that I wanted to visit Iceland, and so have penciled that in for November, as I know that this is a good time of year to travel to Reykjavik.

Once I had made a list of places to travel to, I then had a look at my diary for the year. This way I could see what commitments and plans I needed to work around. In my current job, my annual leave runs 1st April - 31st March, so whilst reviewing my diary, I also worked out how much annual leave I had to take/ensure that it will be spread out across the year. 

Being organised with my diary has been really helpful in planning my trips, I even set up a spreadsheet of the year so that I could easily see what my plans are at a quick glance. 

So, it’s all well and good making a list of travel destinations, and checking your diary to see when you can go, but if your finances aren’t in check, you won’t be able to travel no matter how free your schedule. 

I reviewed my salary and savings and looked at how much I could realistically put to one side every month in order to fund my travel. I also checked through my outgoings to see where I could pull back and save extra cash to put towards traveling. I get asked a lot of questions to do with finances and so I think I might write a blog post to cover this subject a bit more in depth. 

I always think that traveling is more fun with other people. I love to share experiences and memories and with life being so busy, it’s nice to have the excuse to spend some quality time with loved ones.  So it’s good to link in with those that you’d like to travel with and see if your plans fit in with theirs. Once you’ve got the green flag from them the real planning can begin! 

So, list of travel destinations complete, diary organised, finances in check and best buds approved, there’s nothing left to do than book! I always like to book my travel first, whether that is flights, trains, hire cars etc. Once my travel is booked, I then look into accommodation. There is no right or wrong way of doing it, this is just the system I prefer. My top site for booking flights is Sky Scanner - I find that they always hunt down the best prices and offer good little suggestions to save money by amending your flight times or traveling out a day early. I also like to look on Air BnB for accommodation because there is a huge range of places to stay in and if there are more of you the cost can be really low. 

These are my top tips when it comes to planning out a travel overview for the year. However, if you would like to know more information about how I plan/book individual trips ie city breaks/road trips etc, please let me know.