We’ve been following a Facebook group for those in the UK who have taken/are planning early retirement and the subject of escaping to warmer climates for the winter (or longer) came up. I was struck by how nervous a lot of older folk seem to be about travel… “is it safe?”… “how do you find somewhere to stay?”… “which travel agent do you use?” It seems that many folk have only been on all-inclusive package holidays where everything is organised for them and don’t know where to start with traveling independently. Of course, there are also many who have had careers flying around the world at the drop of a hat and are wondering what the problem is. We thought it was worth sharing a few things that we have found useful:

High Level Planning

We joke that Debbie already has our full itinerary in her head and slowly reveals it to Steve so he thinks it’s his idea. Its certainly fair to say that Debbie spends far more time reading travel guides and researching possible locations while Steve would be happy to arrive in town and wander around looking for somewhere to stay. Tip: A Kindle Unlimited subscription gives access to loads of travel guides from the Lonely Planet series to self-published accounts by individuals. These can be used before you set off or on the bus to the next destination.

Debbie prefers to work with tables of information, in Excel, while Steve is more visual and prefers to see a “plan on a page”. An Excel-based year planner from Calendarpedia is a good way to get a high level view. We start by blocking out how long we will be in a given country, since this is often limited by visas and the weather. Then break it down into destinations within the country and when we have actually booked accommodation change the colour from lighter to darker. We add notes with details of accommodation and travel so that we can tell at a glance what has been booked and what still needs to be done.

Detailed Itineraries

Health and Vaccinations

We made a list of all the countries we planned to visit and looked them up on the NHS web site https://www.fitfortravel.nhs.uk/destinations to see which vaccinations were “Advised” and which rated as “Consider”. In many cases the Consider were if you have a risky lifestyle or are immunocompromised We put the information into a table (countries as rows, vaccinations as columns) and quickly realised that if we got the right vaccinations for India we would be covered for everywhere else. The only exception to this is that Yellow Fever is advised for Paraguay, but not anywhere else we were planning to travel so we decided it was easier to skip Paraguay.

Insurance

There’s a big difference between holiday insurance and long-term travel insurance. Typically multi-trip holiday insurance will only cover you for 30 days at a time, returning to the UK between holidays. If you want the cover to last all year you need a specialist travel policy and these are very expensive. The initial quotes we got shocked us because they were coming in around £5,000 a year in total for the two of us.

In the end we used TrueTraveller.com because they are competitively priced (£1,585) and allow you to start and extend cover even if you are already traveling. This will allow us to continue cover into our second year. There is a base product and then you can add packages to cover specific activities. We thought about adding SCUBA cover but this was an additional £400 whereas a separate policy with DiveAssure is only EUR125 for an annual policy and we have used them before for diving trips.

Phones, Internet and eSIMs

It is very expensive to use roaming on your UK mobile account if you are travelling for any length of time. In the past the trick was to buy a local SIM on arrival with a voice and data package and install it in place of your UK SIM (and try not to lose that!) These days most phones support eSIMs that can be used alongside the existing physical SIM. You just sign up to the service online and click a link to install the eSIM, which is just the connection settings and license to connect to the network in the destination country. In India we are using eSIMs from MayaMobile that give 10GB of data for US$17.59 a month (£14.06). You don’t get a phone number or the ability to make voice calls but can send texts, voice and videos using WhatsApp. 10GB is more than enough data when every hotel, bar and cafe has WiFi.

If you do find you need to phone the UK, Skype charge £3.99 for 100 minutes of voice calls to UK numbers. The other “gotcha” are banking apps that log you out after 30 days and insist on texting you an authentication code to log back in. It seems that briefly turning the UK SIM back on to receive the text doesn’t cost anything, but watch this space I may have got this wrong!

This raises the question of whether it is worth keeping your UK mobile contract and phone number while you are away? If you are with Smarty you can pause subscriptions for up to six months before they close the account so just pay for one month in six, on the cheapest plan, to keep the account open and retain your number. You can switch the subscription on and off from their app.

Money – Banks and Prepay cards

A lot of people recommended the Wise and Revolut apps/cards because you can load them up with multiple currencies and then spend as though you have a locally-issued debit card. When we checked the terms and conditions we found that our bank (Starling) already had very competitive foreign exchange rates with no fees for debits or ATM withdrawals (the bank operating the local machine will still probably charge you to take out cash though). TIP: Always pay in local currency, don’t be pressured into paying in £. If you pay in local currency your home bank will do the conversion. If you pay in £ the conversion is performed by the local merchant’s bank, and you have no control over the terms.

Check the terms of any bank, debit and credit cards before you travel to confirm what charges they impose. We have also made sure we have Amex, Visa and Mastercard available so if a country only has one of the payment networks we should be OK. Maybe overkill, but we’ve been told that Mastercard isn’t widely accepted in Australia for example.

Starling also allow us to create “Saving Spaces” alongside the main account so we have set up separate spending pots for Accommodation and Travel. If we don’t spend all of our budget on these in one month because we are somewhere cheap, we can save the excess to use when we are somewhere expensive.

Planning Travel

Rome2Rio is an amazing site to plan travel between anywhere and anywhere else. It knows about air, ferry, train and bus/coach routes and will let you compare routes between pretty much any two places on the globe. Its great for getting an overview before using more specific sites to check prices, details and timetables. Google and Apple maps also have travel planning features but these are nowhere near as comprehensive.

12goasia is another useful site that lets you plan journeys and book tickets, but we have found when we tried to use it for Indian trains that the prices were higher than booking direct with Indian Railways and, more importantly, it showed no tickets available when there are tickets on the Indian Railways site. To book direct with Indian Railways you need to set up an account and we initially had difficulty making payments because the first tab of payment gateways are Indian bank card holders only. If you check out the second tab there are various payment gateways that will process non-Indian cards (e.g. PayU, RazorPay). These process the payment and direct you to your banking app to approve the transaction. We have already had to cancel two train tickets in India and can confirm the refund process works fine.

Finding Flights

Skyscanner.net is our go-to resource to find cheap flights, either using the web site or app. You can search by route and date and set up alerts if you aren’t ready to buy a ticket yet. Once you are ready to book it will show you the prices across multiple booking agencies and the airlines themselves and take you to the to make the booking.

Finding Accommodation

Debbie will spend hours researching different accommodation options on booking.com, agoda, hotels.com, AirBnB etc. Steve is generally happy with anywhere that has a bed and air conditioning. Our approach in India has been to identify places we like the look of on these bookings sites, read the reviews and then contact them directly to see if we can get a better price. Sometimes we book through the booking site and sometimes directly. It is also worth being aware of the cancellation policy; the date up to which you can cancel, any cancellation charges and whether you pay in advance or on arrival.

So far we haven’t just turned up and wandered around the hotels dragging our luggage with us because the prices are pretty cheap even booking in advance, and many of the hotels we have chosen don’t seem to have a lot of availability. We came close to booking the first six days of a two-week stay and using that as a base to find the next place, but then the remaining dates became available so we extended our stay. It may be that in more expensive locations we just book the first night and then “walk in” to other hotels to try to get a good deal but we don’t want to be changing hotels every night just to save a few ££ because you are always stuck dragging your luggage around all day.

Your Thoughts?

We appreciate we are still early on in our travels. We have started with an “easy” destination and are still learning so will update this page occasionally as we gain experience.

If you have any useful tips and tricks please leave them in the comments below or comment on our Facebook page.