Preparation for travels

Hi All!

Cannot wait to start my around the world travels! I am going away for four month and travelling around India, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand and USA. However there was so much preparation I needed do before hand and thought it may be helpful if I shared my experiences.

Good Idea!! Have a solid financial foundation. My girlfriend and I were saving for over six months before we could afford the tickets and are still saving for spending money for our travels. After you have a bit of money in your bank account starts researching!!

Research Topics: Where to go, when to go, for how long, who with, how much will it cost, what travel company to book with, what I will need on my travels.

After doing some extensive research my girlfriend and I decided on the countries above and booked with 'Round the World Experts’ we compared individual flights against the custom made itinerary and found the cost was similar. Advantage to booking with a travel company is they gave a price instantly and offered package or custom made travel itineraries. Also they assign you a 'rep' what they call a personal butler.

Next we decided we should look at the countries we choose to visit in more depth to get an idea of where to go and what we could do while we were there. We used websites like trip advisor and lonely planet. We found both to be very useful for ideas of places to go and where to stay. Just to be sure it is a good idea to cross reference. Especially as far as accommodation goes as different sites has different reviews. We also purchased 'Rough Guide' books from Waterstones at 3 for the price of 2. The other option was 'Lonely Planet' but personally I felt 'Rough Guides' are better books just because they have more colour and are easier on the eyes.

We bought five in total: one for India, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand and one titled: First Time Around the World all. Most of the questions you have plus ones that do not even cross your mind are pretty much covered in these books. (Again good idea to cross reference)

After that it was the case of "where is the best places to go in each country", "how best to spend our time", "what budget will we need", "how much stuff should we take" etc.

Obviously what I like, what budget I have, what I want to see, reasons for travelling, how long I want to go for (realistically go for), who I go with is totally different from the next person the possibilities are many.

Any who! It's almost time and we are very excited. Hope this was helpful.