Good evening everyone! Hope everyone has been doing fine. It feels really crazy that we’re almost done with seven months of 2025. Truly, I feel like this year has been a mad rush, and there are no signs of it stopping anytime soon.
Today, I just felt like covering a topic that I find myself being asked about a lot.
“How do I plan for my trips?”
When I was first asked this question in my late teens, I felt a beaming sense of pride. Like, oh wow – someone is truly interested in my travels! I guess the way I answered back then came off as a bit boastful, since I felt privileged to go on these cool trips. And I acknowledge that privilege – not everyone gets to travel, much less do it solo, without much hesitation or discouragement from family.
Over the years, with the advent of social media and the overload of information, I still get this question a lot. However, I’ve come to feel that there’s no need for me to give recommendations on where to go. One can easily ChatGPT or Google that. To me, it feels more like: “How do I go about planning my trips effectively?”
I know this post is just going to be another one that adds to the noise of social media, though I do hope that this information will be useful for anyone out there stuck on planning their itineraries – be it for their family, friends, or even themselves.
With that said, let’s hope this post serves as a guide of sorts for you, dear reader.
Intention
As with all things, the intention to travel is very important. Is it to satisfy your need to achieve some goals, or to quench your thirst for adventure? These two may sound very similar, because they can both be tied to an adrenaline rush. However, goals can be something more serene—like doing a volunteer trip, or just sitting by the beach to simply be in the moment and away from life back home.
The intention becomes even more important if you plan to travel with someone. Having different intentions will disrupt the rhythm of travel – and not necessarily in a good way.
Company
This brings me to the next point. Is the trip for yourself? Is it with a family member? Do you know the other person’s travel habits, or how they behave when things don’t go their way?
One piece of advice I’ve heard time and again is that to truly know someone, you either 1) live with them or 2) travel with them. I’ve become a bit more particular about who I travel with. I’m not the most laissez-faire when it comes to travel – I curate experiences as much as I can, because I’m a traveller/tourist and time spent away from home is so precious to me. (Then again, time is precious regardless of where I am.)
I don’t mean this in the sense of packing in as many activities as possible. Rather, I ask: are the interactions I have with my travel companions as worthwhile as the experience of going alone?
In my early 20s, I used to travel alone because I was more sporadic and spontaneous. I can safely say that travelling with me wasn’t for the faint-hearted – I was chasing sunsets, sunrises, hikes, etc. Now, with an ageing parent, my travels mostly revolve around taking in the experiences on the go, at my mother’s speed.
Company makes a lot of difference, so I advise you, dear reader, to take the element of a travelling companion seriously.
Budget
I think this is the most quantitative point, and it can really make or break the experience. It becomes even more crucial when you’re travelling with someone else – but for now, I just want to focus on this point alone.
When I first earned a decent adult income (from my day job), I thought experiences should always be paid for when travelling. Now, as I approach my 30s (in a year’s time), I no longer think that’s entirely true.
Certain things become more important – like a good night’s sleep, which makes better accommodation more valuable. Some experiences become priceless, like interacting with locals through staying at a BnB, eating at a local restaurant, or even simple things like grocery shopping.
Paid experiences – like visiting the tallest skyscraper – might be great introductory events, but the free stuff matters too. I recently visited New York with my mother back in May 2025 (which I hope to blog about soon), and while she could barely remember our visit to the Top of the Rock, she remembered every single bit of the free Staten Island Ferry.
Not all paid experiences equate to a priceless memory – and the opposite is true too: a free experience can mean the world.
I like to quote my mum’s memory of how random strangers greeted her with “Assalamu’alaikum” along the streets in the States, over the fact that we ate good food at restaurants. Of course, I’m oversimplifying things here – but you be the judge of how much a particular paid experience means to you (and your travel companion, if any).
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I guess those are the three big things that I’m increasingly evaluating when I plan my upcoming trips. I do hope this information helps someone out there as they plan theirs. As always, feel free to reach out if you need someone to bounce off ideas with. Happy to help!
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