Have you ever thought about how much time you have left to travel with your kids, parents, or friends? Four more summers until the oldest goes off to college? Just a handful of times dates will align for all your friends to take a celebratory trip together? Planning in advance to make these important memories helps make sure they don’t slip by. Here’s how to think about planning your next five years of travel.

Why Have a Plan for Five Years of Travel

Enjoying Important Milestones

Planning travel around important milestones like major birthdays or anniversaries is an amazing way to create lifelong memories with friends and family. If you want to take any of these trips with a larger group, it takes a lot of coordination and “save the dates” to make sure your loved ones can attend. For these types of trips it’s also most important to get the best hotels and experiences, which need to be booked in advance.

Maximizing Time with Your Kids

We’ve had too many new clients come to us in a panic 1-2 years before their oldest child goes off to college. They want to fit in all the amazing trips they had planned to take together but end up having to pick and choose just a couple. Whether you’re hoping to spark their sense of exploration and adventure at a young age, or maximize family time together before graduation – it’s easy to let life get away from you. Having a loose long term travel plan helps ensure the years don’t pass you by.

Securing the Best Availability

When we have a loose long term plan for you, we’ll know when to begin working together to start the actual planning process. Planning ahead then becomes easier and allows us to get the best availability before pricing starts to go up. Remember that some of the most special trips need to be planned about a year in advance (think Safari, Japan, Galapagos). There are other benefits as well – securing time off from work and working with your wealth advisor to plan for cash outlays.

How to Go About Developing Your Plan

Planning out the next five years of travel doesn’t have to be a daunting experience. With a step-by-step process you can come up with a well thought out plan to maximize your time with family and friends.

1. Create a timeline of the major milestones coming up. For example, birthdays, anniversaries, graduation dates, or any other special dates that your family celebrates. Actually write them out on a timeline so you can visualize them!
2. Next, plan a fun evening or weekend with your family to catalog a list of all your “bucket list” destinations and experiences. You can make this simple by getting together and typing out a list, or each person in the family can come with a presentation or vision board of their travel wishlist!
3. Prioritize your family’s travel wishlist from most to least important. Try to narrow down to about ten destinations to make the list easier to work with.
4. Research seasonality of your destinations (or work with us to guide you in this process). You’ll want to know which seasons you want to exclude a visit (for example, let’s avoid Vietnam during rainy season or Italy when it’s crowded in the summer).
5. Talk with your family and understand your travel budget to determine how many major and minor trips you want to take per year.
6. Map your destinations onto your milestones and travel calendar based on the seasonality!
7. Make sure you review your plan at least twice a year to update it and plan trips for the next 12 months. Or send your plan to us so we can help remind you when it’s time to start booking travel!

Planning in this way ensures you won’t miss out on important milestones or making memories with family. The process should be fun! And if you need help, we can manage this process for you with our Client Experience Portfolios.

Are you ready to dive into five years of travel? Reach out HERE to start!