For our honeymoon, Shleah and I chose to do a road trip in Florida, starting in Miami, driving down to the Key West, then driving to Sarasota and Naples before returning to Miami. I took it upon myself to ensure that I had booked everything so we wouldn’t have to figure things out when we got there.
After arriving at Miami International Airport, we had to get a bus to the car hire centre. On this bus I looked at my car booking and realised that the car had been booked for the month I had booked it in rather than the current month we were travelling, My voucher was two months out of date. Thinking back I remembered that the booking website had timed out when I had originally tried to make the booking leading to the date resetting.
We were quite distraught after finding this out and it was only after long negotiations, half an hour later that we were able to secure a rental car paying cash on the day.
This all could have been avoided if we had only used a trip organiser.
Trip organisers are correlation tools for bookings from multiple sources and are pretty invaluable if you are booking a trip independently. Trip organisers are great in that they ensure that you have not made any mistakes with dates which can often happen when you are crossing time zones and that there have not been any typos in your booking, such as putting in the wrong month or year. They let you see your entire itinerary as a flow so that if your connections don’t line up, or you are missing a hotel booking it is pretty obvious.
Many of the most popular organisers have a free version which is more than good enough for the vast majority of users. Google does some trip organisation with its integration of Gmail with Google Calendar but having a standalone organiser can make the process a lot more deliberate and you can add in things like attraction bookings and tours.
I have been using trip organisers for the last five years and have never since had a logistical or timing issue with any of my trips which have continued to get more and more complicated. My personal organiser of choice is Tripit but I am sure whatever you use, it will help you keep on top of all the intricacies of your travel.
