International Travel Itinerary Booking Tips

You Can Travel Smarter and Less Expensively When You Make Smart Choices While Booking Your Trip

If you’ve never booked a trip with international travel, you might feel a little intimidated over the whole process. You may even wonder whether you’ve made the best arrangements and gotten the best prices for your trip.

Did you find the best price on airfare? Is the route the quickest or the one with the least number of layovers? Are the hotels conveniently located to your activities? Have you taken advantage of all possible travel options in your destination country?

Sometimes, it seems like there are far too many decisions to make regarding international travel, but that’s why it’s always a good idea to start researching early. Get the best and most enjoyable trip possible by spending some time searching for different activities, routes, flights, and stays.

I’m sure you’d hate to make an arrangement or book travel only to find out later that you could have made a better choice on some facet of your trip. With just a small amount of preparation, you can avoid some of the common pitfalls of international travel bookings.

I offer specific details on every part of this process in my book, but you may find it helpful to start your search with the following tips in mind. Hopefully, these will help you get the ball rolling on your itinerary and eventually help you finalize all those different plane tickets, hotel reservations, and guided tours.

As a general note: you can use all of these tips for your domestic travel, too. Don’t assume you can only employ this advice if you’re traveling across the globe!

(note: some of the links here are to websites with which I am an affiliate, and your purchases help fund my website!)

A view of the coastline of Los Angeles while aboard a jet. — Taking off from LAX in Los Angeles in a Delta flight to Minneapolis.

Looking At Nearby Airports When You Book

At your departure city or arrival city, you may have a few options for international flights. As someone who lives in Southern California, I’m absolutely surrounded by airports. Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is the biggest, but there’s also significant airports in nearby Burbank, Long Beach, and Orange County.

In many cases, the simplest and least expensive option, at least in my case, is a departure from LAX. I’m fortunate that I have a friend near the airport who allows me to park at their house while I’m gone. However, if it was necessary for me to park at the airport and pay for my car to sit there (or get an Uber to the airport), I might actually use one of the closer options (Burbank is much closer to me than LAX, but usually more expensive).

If you’re not quite sure whether you can reach an airport easily, don’t forget that some metropolitan areas also offer train service into nearby stations. Los Angeles is in the midst of a significant expansion of trains that run to LAX, but there are trains in other states, too.

If you’re in Upstate New York, for example, you can take a train to get to JFK, Newark, or LaGuardia, but you can also head northward to Albany or check the prices at the small regional airports of Stewart and Westchester. Tons of airports, not just JFK, for you New Yorkers, New Jerseyites, Pennsylvanians, and Connecticuters.

In addition to making sure you consider nearby airports at your departure city, don’t forget to look alternatives in your destination country. Not only may you come upon less expensive plane tickets when you choose a different airport, but the flight times may also align better with your proposed international itinerary.

An iceberg floating in a glacial lagoon in southeastern Iceland. — An ice berg in a glacial lagoon in Iceland.

Always Search & Book Hotels Last

You may find it counterintuitive, but hotels are the last thing I look for, other than restaurants (which don’t usually need to be booked in advance, though you may find it helpful to make reservations ahead of time for some places).

The way I see it, finding a hotel you absolutely love before you’ve looked at your travel route means you might make some choices for your itinerary that don’t make as much sense as they would if you weren’t so invested in staying at a particular hotel, motel, B&B, or short term rental.

Sometimes, you won’t have a particularly large number of options for your stays, but as long as you can find a reasonably comfortable place to lay your head when you travel, you’ll be fine. Let the experiences you hope to have while traveling guide your itinerary, rather than your hotel options.

Let me share an example. When I was booking my international itinerary to Iceland, I styled our vacation as a road trip, and we ended up on the northern side of the Snaefellsnes Peninsula for our second night (the peninsula is on the western side of Iceland).

Honestly, there aren’t a tremendous number of places to stay in the area, so I was pretty limited on our hotel options with just a half a dozen short term rentals, hostels, and bare-bones motels. If you do a hotel search for Ólafsvík, where we stayed, you’ll notice that there are some options, but it’s not like a major metropolitan area where there are endless hotels and different places to stay.

Sure, I could have driven up or down the road 15 or 20 miles, but in this instance, my itinerary and our activities took precedence over staying in another location with other lodging options.

This is a palace in the south of England where you can walk around and feel posh. — England was a really expensive trip, but I still remember much of it many years later.

Compare Prices for Different Transportation

If you’re an American, the biggest piece of advice I can offer is to consider different types of transportation besides cars and planes when you visit another country. Some countries are quite spread out, and you’re really going to experience them best in a car (Canada and Iceland are a few examples).

However, other places are loaded with train tracks and bus routes, and they also have loads of options for chauffeured ground transportation that isn’t too expensive, even if the driver is taking you more than 100 miles.

Let’s take Morocco, for example, When I began investigating travel in Morocco, I initially settled on a road trip type of vacation. I found that it was possible to rent a car and drive to all the major cities, as well as some outlying villages. But as I researched my trip (see how important research is?), I realized that Morocco has some high speed trains that run between some of its biggest cities.

Not only would the trains take me from location to location, but getting on a train is easier than driving yourself in a foreign country, and it’s usually quicker and cheaper (or at least the same price) as flying on a small regional airline.

One of the best reasons to choose a train rather than a short flight is that you can basically walk up to the train just minutes before it departs, but with security and all the hassles of airline travel, you have to allocate at least four hours (two on each side of your flight) to airline travel.

When you consider all available options for transportation, you not only have the opportunity to save money on your trip, but you may also find travel options that better align with your guided tours and activities.

Read Reviews for Your Guided Tours, Trips, & Tickets

Yes, the internet is often filled with subterfuge, so you can’t always trust every review you read, but you can still get a good idea as to whether something you want to book is worth booking.

When you examine the item, whether it’s a guided tour, an airline, or a restaurant, consider the number of reviews first. If the tour is new and there are only six reviews, it may feel a little difficult to form an opinion on it. However, if the review has more than 100 reviews, it’s usually beneficial to read through a handful, to see what people enjoyed or didn’t enjoy.

You might not realize a hotel you’re interested in has a problem with street noise until you start reading the reviews. If you’re particularly sensitive to noise and want a quiet room, those reviews might be your signal to start looking for an alternative place to stay.

I’ll share another example of when I used reviews for a trip. When I was searching for hotels in Iceland, I initially booked a hotel in Reykjavík for our first night in the country, but I realized soon after that people who visited the hotel reported a lot of extra charges on their bills. With that information handy, I cancelled our reservation and booked a stay at an alternative property, which worked out well for location, noise, and cost.

(FYI Iceland have some AMAZING HOTELS – do consider Hotel Geysir and the Basalt Hotel if you travel Iceland; they are both incredible)

While you can’t always get absolutely every piece of information you want from a review, remember that different sites do have different reviews. Not only can you search through Google for reviews, but any major booking website will also tend to host reviews. Always read as much as you can while comparing places to stay.