Travelling is a blissful experience for many. By travelling to new destinations one can learn about new cultures, meet new people, eat different food and shop the local delicacies. Travelling helps you relax from your monotonous and busy lifestyle. People travel for business as well as personal purposes. Other than that be it a family function, friend’s destination wedding or just meeting relatives from faraway towns; everyone travels at least once in a year. But all these sound like obligatory tours. We believe that everyone should enjoy a leisure trip every year. A leisure trip is essentially designed to help you relax without any major obligations. The leisure trips can be a little expensive. But if you plan to go for leisure trips every year, you can save funds accordingly and plan your trip.
Here are the tips to plan your annual trip in 5 easy steps.
Step 1: Decide a destination and stick to it
For any travel, a legitimate destination is must. So decide a destination as per your mood. Consider the season in which you will be travelling and short list a few places. Check your travelling bucket list, if you have one. Mark your preferences and decide your final destination. After deciding, do not change your destination. Because the next steps of planning your annual trip highly depend on your destination. So when you lock the destination, make sure you do not change it and visit it at decided time.
Step 2: Decide the number of travelers and stick to it
You can travel to your decided destination alone, with your spouse or friends or family. Decide the number of people you want to take on the trip as whether you want space & privacy or you want to have group fun. Accordingly ask person/people you want with you on your trip and lock the number. Consult them on the destination. Once you know how many people will be accompanying you on the trip, stick to it. If the number changes, so will the budget and other details of your trips.
Step 3: Decide whether you will travel with a touring company or plan your own trip
Many travel companies and online portals now-a-days help you plan your trip instantly. You can purchase their tour packages which they have already designed or ask them for a customized package as per your needs. They will do all the bookings, arrange guide for you and charge you minimal fees for it. You can also plan your own trip by doing research on your own. Here you’ll have to do all the bookings personally and make other arrangements for the trip by yourself. This can be time consuming but a pocket friendly method.
Step 4: Calculate your funds and save accordingly
As said earlier, a leisure trip can be expensive. Whether you are travelling solo or with a group, some expenses are unavoidable. If you want to have a budget trip or are willing to spend a fairly moderate sum, you have to make planning. As this is annual trip you can save every month in fixed deposit/recurring account, invest your annual bonus & cash gifts in mutual funds. When you know the destination and the number of travelers, you can save accordingly. Let’s say, you are planning to go to Rajasthan in December with 3 of your family friends. The 7 day trip to Rajasthan in December costs Rs. 40,000 per person. So divide Rs. 40,000 into 12 (months), which are Rs. 3333.33 per month. So every month you have to save Rs. 3333.33 starting from January to go to Rajasthan in December.
Step 5: Plan ahead of time
Planning is crucial when you are going for a trip. When you plan and make your bookings in time, you get many benefits of the same. You can get discounts and will have to pay less on air tickets and hotel bookings. You can use your credit card to pay for these bills using the reward points or to earn more points. You can convert the credit card payments into EMI and pay the bills monthly via your trip savings. Also planning early you can get a travel insurance to secure your travel easily.
Besides this you can always take a quick personal loan for travel to pay for the above mentioned expenses.
