How do you plan for a big trip? Do you go on a tour and let them take care of everything for you? Do you plan out an itinerary ahead of time? Do you just wing it and plan day by day? Do you always have a guide book in hand? Or do you use an app these days?
Although recently we have tested the waters by using app’s alone on a few trips, we still love to start our trip planning with a stack of guidebooks. There’s nothing like the excitement we feel when we lug home a stack from the library and spread them out between us with a glass of wine, a cozy blanket, and a big notepad. And there we can sit for hours reading side by side, discovering towns that sound spectacularly undiscovered, unusual, but creative museums or hard to reach but oh so amazing beaches.
Maybe we’ve already hit “purchase” on our airline tickets and now we want to start to finding the specifics about where we want to go, or maybe the trip is still just a vision, a hope, a dream, and we want to start honing in on making it a reality. Either way, once we have a guidebook in hand, there’s usually no stopping the momentum of the trip….we are going to go now, one way or another. How can you resist the urge to discover and explore that is generated when you read about the places to see, people to meet, culture to experience, and food to eat? That constant excitement of travel, of discovering things new to you everyday, is totally addicting and we have to get our fix as often as we can afford.
But even for the more practical things, guidebooks are still the easiest way for us to get all the essential info of a trip in one place. They provide a few photos, not always much (especially if you use Lonely Planet), but just enough to tease us and make us want to get there as fast as possible to see more. But they also include a little, or sometimes quite a lot, of background about the countries, the towns, the neighborhoods even. They tell us how to get around, if we need a visa, what average hotel and food costs will be so we can plan a budget, and they help us start to pick out the towns and sights and places we definitely want to see and to slowly come up with a route through the country.
We’ve tried a few trips lately without guidebooks, where we’ve booked a trip and left with little warning. For those we’ve often used Trip Advisor to find a hotel and Yelp to find a few restaurants we want to try (if we are going to be in a big city that Yelp covers). But for actual on-the-go touring when we are on the ground in those places, we’ve tried using online guides like the Trip Advisor City Guides app, (which is an app you can download with an offline guide, so you don’t have to use wifi or have an international data plan). The guides have restaurants and places to stay but also have walking tours that link to maps to show you where to go and little bits of info about the highlights along the way. We’ve also tried Stay.com, an app that lets you choose from common places to see and eat in a location and compile them into your personal list of things to do in that city. You can see them in a list or on a map.
Between the two of those we were able to get around Europe pretty well, but they weren’t ideal. I still want an app where I can choose all the places I want to go, stay, eat, and see, organize those by day and time, and then only see one day at a time on a map. So for instance, if you were in Paris for three days, your first day map would show you all the places you are going to go that day and how to get between them, such as the airport, your hotel, a cafe for lunch, a museum, a garden, a store to check out, and a place for dinner, then directions back to your hotel. And it would do all of that offline using only the phone’s GPS (you would load all the info before you go) so that you don’t need an international cell phone plan. Basically you would pick all the places and it would generate an itinerary day by day with directions, hours for everything, and let you organize it by the order you want to go to everything within each day. Unfortunately I haven’t found that yet, but maybe it’s out there, and if not, I bet it’s going to be soon. Anyone have a perfect travel guide app they use?
Actually, it seems many of the traditional guidebook companies like Fodor’s, Frommer’s, and of course Lonely Planet, have really been struggling to keep up with and navigate into the digital age. No one can quite figure out how to do it best, or if an app can ever truly replace a book. I just read an article in Outside Magazine (BTW this is my new favorite magazine! I just read it cover to cover. I never do that. And every single article was great. It covers outdoor travel and sports, adventure anything, and suggested tours and hotels, with a little food and gear suggestions mixed in. It’s a perfect match for me). Anyway, I just read an article about Lonely Planet, which was recently acquired by a new owner and a 25-year-old photographer was charged with running the company. Their hope, with this very young CEO, I believe, is to redesign the company for the digital age, making it more interactive and allowing user-contributed material to play a bigger role like Trip Advisor and Yelp have done. They are trying to find a way to analyze and organize the massive amounts of data they have about every place on the planet to come up with an app similar to the one I’ve dreamt about. But, as far as I can tell, it’s still in process.
Lonely Planet has been our trusted guidebook for many of our big trips…it got us through Thailand, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Indonesia, as well was many cities both nationally and internationally. It’s definitely our go to for the witty writing and the unusual and usually affordable recommendations it makes for places to see, stay, or eat. But can they keep the witty charm their writers provide, while also incorporating more user-generated content? Will an app ever feel as easy to navigate as opening a book and flipping through it’s pages? So far for me, it still doesn’t compare.
And even though guidebooks control the information in a way that guides people all to the same “undiscovered” spot sometimes, there can be something rather charming about the way that brings fellow travelers together. You know, when you get to that cafe or beach or hostel that you thought only you would know about because the writer made it seem so unknown and special, but you look around and there are at least 10 other people holding their trusty Lonely Planet and glancing sideways at you with a look that says “Oh you found it too? But it was supposed to be my special find. Well, I guess this means we read the same guidebook. You have good taste. Ok, let’s be friends…”
User-generated content certainly opens up many more places to eat, stay and see than a single guidebook can ever print, so it provides more options and spreads out travelers more. But even though most seasoned travelers might say they want to discover and experience only the “real” culture and people and avoid other tourists, finding those fellow, like-minded travelers along the way because you were all guided there by the same guidebook is a special part of traveling and a “culture” to experience all it’s own. And it can make for great, spontaneous friendships or help you meet new travel partners.
For me, there’s still something extra special about reading that guidebook, even if I don’t take it with me. At least for now, it’s still the place I want to start my adventures.How about you? Do you have a guidebook or app that you swear by? How do you plan your trips? We are always happy to find and try out new suggestions…so please share!
{all photos by Pinneapple Tree of places discovered using Lonely Planet: La Boca, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Bo Sang, outside of Chaing Mai, Thailand; Jack Kerouac Alley, San Francisco, CA; Cremation Ceremony, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia; Julia Pfeiffer Burns Park, Big Sur, CA}
***none of these links or guidebook companies we mentioned are sponsoring this post, we’re just sharing our preferences and experience.