Planning a trip can be overwhelming when you and your travel companion(s) live in the same place, but if you add a little distance the whole process can seem nearly impossible. But never fear! These backpacks have a bunch of experience planning trips while living 10,000 km apart.
Of course, a lot of these tips will apply to people planning a trip from the same place. Even if you’re not thousands of kilometers away from each other, you can rest assured that our techniques have helped us plan complex trips while Katie was living in Montreal and Carol in Beijing.
Our biggest tip:
Use Google Drive or another filesharing platform to your advantage. Create a shared folder for your trip to hold planning spreadsheets, research documents, ticket PDFs, photos of your passports, etc. This way, everyone knows where all the documents are and can easily check key dates or edit the plan as it comes together.
Planning
Proceed with your research the same way you would for any trip, using travel guides and websites. Online research will make it easier for you to share what you find with your companions, but you can always take photos of books to send.
Use a shared spreadsheet to rough out your itinerary. This is a technique that we took from the Man in Seat 61 and we find it very useful. Here’s what our spreadsheet for a sprint through Scandinavia looks like (fares & durations are approximate):
Each line represents a different day, and each column a different aspect of the trip. With a spreadsheet, it’s easy to get an overview of the trip, colour code different sections, and make notes about transport, activities and costs. It’s also handy to make sure you’re booking travel or accommodation for the correct day.
If you’re planning a very long trip, you can split it into segments, with a different sheet in the same workbook for each section of the journey.
To find transport, Rome2Rio is your best friend – with a few caveats. Rome2Rio can find you transport from anywhere to anywhere, and it’s most useful for identifying which services operate which routes. Plan the trip on their website to get an idea of the duration and complexity of the journey, and identify which operators you should check out. Then, check schedules and prices directly on the operators website. Don’t trust rome2rio for prices & schedules, as it may not have the most up to date information.
When planning with Rome2Rio, split longer journeys into smaller segments to explore all your options. Who knows – there might be an interesting spot you hadn’t thought of visiting that breaks up your journey and decreases the cost.
Booking
As much as possible, book transport when everyone taking the trip is online and available to chat, to ensure all details are confirmed. You can walk through the booking by phone or group message. To make sure all travellers get to sit together, one person should make each booking, but take screenshots of the booking steps to have your companions verify their personal data. You never know when you will accidentally invert first and last names or mess up a birthdate.
Otherwise, you can designate different tasks to each person – for example, Carol is a pro at booking accommodation, so I usually let him take care of that and am pleasantly surprised by wherever we end up spending the night.
Create shared folders for PDFs of tickets and other booking documents, so that everyone has access to them as needed.
Splitting Costs
Use…you guessed it…a spreadsheet to keep track of who is paying for what (hotels, transport) before the trip starts. You can set up the sheet to calculate the total cost of what each person has paid so far, as well as the difference between each total, to ensure costs balance out in the end.
Here’s a sample sheet to calculate pre-paid costs (again, prices and exchange rates are approximate):
Once you’re on the road, use whatever cost splitting method you prefer. For short trips, we like to keep a note on our phones of what each of us spends, tally it up at the end, and have one person pay the other in cash to even it out. For longer trips, you could create a shared bank account, or each withdraw the same amount of cash at once and pool it to pay for your daily expenses.
Meeting Up
Be precise about where and when you’ll meet your companions to start the journey. You never know whether someone’s phone will die or not have service.
The bottom line:
Double, triple, quadruple check everything, but especially dates and passport numbers. And most of all, enjoy the time you get to spend with your long-distance companions!
