Itinerary Tips for First-Time International Travelers

Should you feel afraid to travel internationally for the first time?

The first time you get your passport stamped is pretty fun, but what about all the adventures that come after you leave the airport? Is international travel an activity that requires loads and loads of preparation and information?

Or, can you travel to a different country by “winging” it, with nothing more than your backpack and a sense of adventure in front of you?

You can certainly put a serious amount of time and effort into planning every facet of your first international vacation, but there comes a point where it’s just time to squash your nerves and just take the plunge.

One of the most important things you can remember when planning your first international vacation is that virtually any country you travel to will feature people that aren’t really too different from you.

Despite language barriers, different foods, and different customs, people all over the world are able to get along with one another without a serious amount of effort. Further, experiencing all those different cultures may offer you a new and valuable perspective on humanity’s place in the world.

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

Relying On a Full Tour for Your Entire Vacation

If you’re particularly nervous about booking your own international itinerary (read my book to figure out how to do it on your own!), the easiest option is to book a complete tour that may include everything from your tickets and tour buses to the food and hotels you’ll stay in during your journey.

Let’s look at an example. For my Morocco trip, I booked several activities like hiking near Marrakech, a walking tour of Casablanca, and a guided tour of Fez, as well as train tickets, flights, and hotels. All of these items were booked separately on specific days.

However, you don’t necessarily need to do a deep dive yourself into all the tourist opportunities in the country you visit. Consider this eight-day tour of Morocco, which takes you to a bunch of cities including Marrakech, Casablanca, and Fez (or Fes, depending on how you want to spell it), just like my itinerary.

This tour includes local guides, transportation inside Morocco, and everything you need for a fantastic trip except for your plane tickets, which are easy to book after you figure out your tour dates.

You can book a muti-day or multi-stop tour in most tourist destinations around the world, and all you usually have to do is book your flights and pack your suitcase. Your tour guides and planners handle the rest for you. A guided tour is a great option for your first international trip.

Stay In Control When You Book Your Own Tours

If you already have some knowledge of the country you’d like to visit, you can absolutely plan your own international trip, even if you’ve never ever gotten your passport stamped before.

(By the way, if you don’t have a passport, you need to get that thing as soon as you can, especially if you’re in the United States. Those things take time! And don’t forget your visa, too. Some countries require it, son’t.)

I book many of my trips on Get Your Guide and Viator (yes, I’m an affiliate of both, I figure, why not promote the businesses I’m using IRL, right?), and it’s really easy to find a big list of tours in a particular city. You can literally type in a city name and get a big list of available tours.

Now, the cool thing about using a site like GYG or Viator is that you might get some ideas about travel destinations that you didn’t even know existed before your search. Further, you may decide that some of those experiences are best handled on your own while others are better with a guide.

The great thing about booking your own tours and crafting your own itinerary is that you get to make all the decisions. It’s not a tour company creating the whole experience for you.

Sure, a tour company that creates a multi-day itinerary for you can certainly help you experience an amazing adventure in a faraway land, but don’t doubt your own capabilities in creating a fun tour for yourself, your partner, or anyone else coming along.

Try an “Easy” Destination First

For your first international trip, you can definitely do all the planning yourself and have a superb time exploring, especially if you try an “easy” place first. The first international locations I ever visited (outside of Mexico and Canada, which really don’t count for Americans) was the UK and Ireland.

Since I traveled there before the ease of internet hotel booking, I actually planned nothing more than my flights and the first hotel I stayed at when I landed in London. I was definitely winging it a bit, and I’m surprised everything came out as good as it did.

I took the train all over the UK and Ireland and would just call a few bed and breakfast establishments in the town I wanted to visit next to make a reservation. This is no joke: I actually used nothing more than Rick Steves Great Britain to get around, see stuff, and book places to stay.

Some of the foibles I experienced on my first international trip included a failed road trip to Bath to see Stonehenge (I was 20 and they wouldn’t let me rent a car, so I couldn’t get from the train station near Stratford-Upon-Avon over to Bath), as well as a lack of funds for my train ticket from Wales back to London when I left. I tried to budget as best I could, but I slightly underestimated my walking-around money.

With today’s options for booking tours, flights, tickets, and just about every facet of your vacation (even the reservations at the restaurants you’ll visit), you should find it quite easy to book your trip in what you feel is a familiar country.

If you’re an American and your uber nervous about traveling international, why not try Canada or Mexico first? The Yucatan peninsula is full of easy beach towns to visit with hotels that cater to tourists, or you can head north to Canada and go on an adventure on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Language Barrier

The last topic we’ll cover is the language barrier. If you’re headed to Uzbekistan and the only language you speak is English, don’t worry! I guarantee you’ll have very few issues communicating.

(Uzbekistan is on my bucket list, and I hope to travel there in the next few years!)

I’ve been in the serious middle-of-nowhere in Vietnam, and I’ve communicated with people who knew virtually zero words of English, but you’d be surprised how much you can get done with a few individual words and some gestures.

One of my friends told me a humorous story about traveling to Romania, where it’s always a hit or miss as to whether someone will speak English (at least it was when they traveled there).

My friend speaks Spanish as a second language and found someone in Romania who didn’t speak English but spoke Spanish, so she could still communicate easily with the man. This just goes to show you that you never know what languages the locals will speak when you travel somewhere.

And you shouldn’t feel at all nervous if you’re traveling as a single lingual. These days, it’s possible to communicate with just about everyone in some fashion or another (even if it’s with a smartphone and a translation app!).

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