The Best Practical Travel Tips When Things Go Wrong

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5 Practical travel tips that help frequent travelers take advantage of mishaps, mistakes, and missed connections for a more personalized travel experience. You can’t plan for most of the above because travel, like travel tips, is imperfect. Everyone who travels has Googled travel tips. Travel is flawed, which honestly makes your trip to Paris different from my trip to Paris. With that being said, several travel tips are not so definitive. Here are 5 of my favorite practical travel tips when things go wrong.

The Best Practical Travel Tips When Things Go Wrong

How to Turn Travel Problems Into Travel Opportunities

Travel is lost or delayed baggage, allergic reactions, an overpriced restaurant, or a hotel room you can’t recognize from its website pictures. If you travel frequently, you’ll experience tourist attractions that are more like tourist traps. You’ll have bad weather. Try to avoid an overnight flight crammed in the middle seat between someone who snores and someone who keeps resting his head on your shoulder. But none of the above has to contribute to a terrible vacation. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Travel is imperfect. Here are 5 Practical travel tips that help frequent travelers take advantage when travel goes wrong for a more personalized travel experience.

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1. Everything is Closed on Monday

Have you gone to Florence on Monday and forgot that the Uffizi and Accademia are always closed on Mondays but open on Sundays? Head over to Boboli Gardens, the Medici Chapels of the Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore instead. Many sources say they don’t include Monday in your itinerary because many attractions are closed. Yes, but some aren’t, and you’ll find fewer people in the area, which sounds like an excellent opportunity to study the outside of the buildings as well as a picnic in a park nearby. Sometimes you can’t plan a trip without including a Monday. What are some of your favorite Monday activities?

            

 

2. Booking Hotels

Travel tips are a must-have like luggage, passports, and a terrible in-flight meal. You’ll hear them in the airport terminal, on the plane in the hotel lobby, and good grief. Just Google travel tips, and you’ll learn that it’s best to travel to Italy in the Fall on one website and in the summer on another. However, the truth is that Italy is a great travel destination all year long. Ultimately, it depends on your itinerary and budget.

Are you a spontaneous traveler? Most travel tips suggest you should book your airfare far in advance. Sure, but if you have the flexibility, you might miss out on those last-minute deals that always seem to pop up if you wait. There is no sure-fire method for booking the perfect accommodation.

I love that travel is not without tension or discomfort. My favorite travel experiences have been ones where I discovered I had no concrete boundaries. @WITSummit with @zimism and @maximumbeth. pic.twitter.com/T8HHgLJt5f

— Stacey (@duffelbagspouse) October 3, 2020

 

3. Long Layovers Don’t Suck 

A long layover is the first indication of when travel goes wrong. Despite conventional belief, long layovers are not a waste of time if you use your time wisely. And not if you have a long enough delay can you leave the airport and venture into a new city. You never know. Your short adventure may lead to a more extended stay in the future. It might even be the highlight of your trip. Be proactive. Check out search engines like skip lagged for layover flights. Have you had a memorable layover? Did you plan it?

 

4. Don’t Always Look for the Cheapest Flight

Fly out of the nearest or largest airport. Yeah, it may save you a little travel time. However, you may have spent less money (and gained a story to tell) if you had flown into or out of Rome and rented a car and driven the 3-hrs from Rome to Naples instead. Some of my most memorable adventures occurred on road trips and thinking outside the box. When was the last time you thought outside the box?

Check out one of my favorite road trips to Budapest, Vienna, and Slovakia here.

 

5. Reviews are Infallible

I like to read reviews when I travel. But they aren’t the only way I determine the value of a hotel, restaurant, or activity. Like guide books, they are just the start of my research. There is no way of knowing all the reasons a person writes a good or bad review. Try to read between the lines to make sure the writer doesn’t have an ulterior motive for the review. It’s a matter of reviewing the product, and not so much the packaging or how it was delivered.

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