This article focuses on how to plan your multi-city land vacation with me. Winter/early Spring is when I have the highest requests to begin planning multi-city custom trips – a.k.a. built from scratch. These include places like the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and Costa Rica.
Plan your multi-city land vacation Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash
You’ll learn more about what goes into the making of these custom trips. I’ll share one little secret – it takes time! Hours and hours go into your custom trips as I try to build out the trips multiple ways to get you the best options for your specific trip objectives. You may not even see some of the earlier attempts as I plan out your itinerary.
Question: Have you ever been on a multi-city land vacation? This could be on an escorted or organized tour. Or, you may have traveled without an organized group such as visiting Rome/Florence/Venice independently.
Plan your multi-city land vacation Photo by Asli Yilmaz on Unsplash
Have you ever planned a multi-city trip with me? If not, let’s get planning your dream trip today. Just click here.
While I mentioned Rome/Florence/Venice above as an example, how about Reykjavik, Iceland, Edinburgh Scotland, and a side tour to the Isle of Skye? (Planned for a client earlier in the year.)
Have you spent hours online doing research?
Are you looking for someone to help you organize all of the details of your dream trip? We’re talking:
airfare with different cabins/classes of service
transfers
hotels with complicated room configurations
tours/excursions
dining
trains
travel insurance
golf
theater/event tickets
And, how about if I wrap up all of the details into an app you can download onto your smart phone? Click here to start planning your multi-city dream trip today.
Learn more about my travel planning packages. Click here to dig even deeper into multi city land vacation travel. Finally, read this post on how to pack for great tips.
Wonder how I go from your initial travel survey to a wonderful trip itinerary?
Getting from our initial contact to your completed travel itinerary takes a lot of work! (The majority of the task is my job to make your complex travel planning easy.) After you submit your trip planning survey, we’ll take these steps to work together on your dream trip itinerary:
Trip planning kick-off call
Initial trip proposal(s)
Multiple email iterations
Calls as needed
Final itinerary ready
Let’s look at an actual travel planning survey that was submitted early in 2015 for a 20th Anniversary dream trip itinerary through Italy this August.
What is the objective of your trip? Any special celebrations or milestones?
Italiano: Collage di varie foto riguardanti la cultura dell’Italia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Pleasure, celebrating 20th wedding anniversary
Do you have a specific destination(s) in mind? Why?
Do you have specific dates? or a flexible window to travel?
Mid/Late August – somewhat flexible (our anniversary is in August which is the reason for the timing/date….as an option we could consider July but I suspect pricing/availability will be about the same given peak travel months).
This section provides a glimpse into your lifestyle and past “travel personality” so we can collaborate on a memorable experience. Where have you previously vacationed? What did you like or not like? WHY? I want to hear whatever you’ll share.
Personal trip through Western Europe out of college.
Vienna/Budapest with my wife
Australia – Sydney/Adelaide
Multiple trips to Hawaii, Mexico and around US.
And, what types of trips have you taken?
All-Inclusive Resort
Hotel
Theme Park
Escorted Tour
Independent Tour (Multi-city)
What will YOUR trip feel like? What do you envision yourself doing? Exciting with lots of activities? Group tours? Time to explore on your own? relaxing on the beach?
Interest in this trip is both site seeing as well as taking in Italian culture (food, wine, etc)….plus relaxation for part of the trip (e.g. beach town on Italian coast/rivieria). As far as site seeing, I am open to both group tours as well as exploring on our own.
Do you have a preferred hotel/resort/cruise line/air line? Loyalty program member? Any “must haves” such as ocean view or balcony room?
No must haves. Would like to stay in moderate to nice accommodations (nice, but does not need to be 5 star).
That was the beginning of the trip planning process or “trip genesis.”
What happens next in planning your trip itinerary?
So after we discussed the trip survey, I went to work designing the “trip flow.” When I design a custom trip itinerary, I work out the “trip flow” first which includes:
number of cities visited
number of nights in each city,
order of cities visited
required pre/post nights due to air schedules to begin or end the in-country portion of the trip itinerary
We review the trip flow prior to getting into the hotel and tours, etc. By focusing on the trip flow, my clients clients and I stay focused on designing the optimal trip WITHOUT getting distracted by how nice a hotel looks, or which tours are “must do’s” as this fun stuff will come next. NOTE: the tours can be the most memorable part of the trip.
Montalcino, Toscana, Italia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
For this particular trip, staying in Tuscany was mandatory as touring wineries in the Montalcino area was KEY! Visiting a beach town in Cinque Terra was also highly desired for relaxation after heavy sightseeing. There were stays in Florence and Rome to take in the “must do” sightseeing.
We started getting some traction and agreed on the number of nights in each city. To make the whole trip itinerary work, there needed to be one longer travel day from Cinque Terra down to a Rome (FCO) airport hotel to finish up the trip. It was also decided to visit Venice as a day trip from Florence.
Now it was time to make this happen by selecting hotels, train, tours, and transfers. My client had already booked airline tickets to coordinate with the start/stop dates of the trip itinerary.
So, want to see the final trip? Click on the itinerary calendar below to get the whole trip (Zoom in and scroll around if you want to really take in the details.). Be sure to see some pictures of my travel guests enjoying their trip in Italy below the trip itinerary calendar. Want a custom planned trip for yourself?Don’t hesitate to contact me today.
Sample Italy trip Itinerary (click for enlarged view)View from Hotel Pasquale Monterosso al Mare on Cinque Terre coastlineCinque TerreCinque Terre Hiking
