Vacations appeal to just about everyone. Some vacations are cultural to experience different places, ways of life, and history. Other vacations have the sole purpose of relaxation and recharging. Both of these are important at different times in your life. The specific focus of this post will be how to plan a cultural vacation.
The steps to planning a cultural vacation are very different than a relaxing trip to the beach. While recharging should be a part of the plan, it takes a different form on this type of trip. Cultural vacations are about seeing new parts of the world. They are about experiencing different cultures than your own and learning about the world around you. This means the cultural vacations will often include more activities than a relaxing holiday. Cultural vacations also tend to be further from home and in foreign countries. For this reason, it is common to overfill them with activities attempting to get the most out of the experience. A trip like this doesn’t need to feel like school. Nor should you feel like you need a vacation after your vacation. The trip should be tailored to your likes and preferences.
Without further ado, here are the steps to planning a great cultural vacation:
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Step 1 – Trip Length
The first step in planning a vacation is to understand how much time you have available for the trip. This is often dictated by available vacation time from work or school breaks, but it shouldn’t be a roadblock to traveling. If you don’t have any time or only have one day, then a cultural trip probably won’t happen. However, you can do trips in a weekend or half a week if that’s what you have to work with. Don’t let a limited amount of vacation time be a reason not to travel.
For example, a week in Europe would be great, but suppose you only have one or two vacation days at work. Get inventive with your vacation time and use the weekends to your advantage. It is easy to take off a Thursday and Friday combined with the weekend to make a pretty good European vacation. Flights from the US East Coast to Europe typically leave in the evening and travel overnight. Fly Wednesday evening after work so you don’t have to use a vacation day. This would mean you have all day Thursday – Saturday in Europe. You would also get a half-day Sunday before a flight would bring you back home.
The above example proves that you don’t need weeks of time off to have a vacation in a foreign country. However, at the same time be realistic with the time you do have. A Thursday to Sunday trip is great for seeing one or two cities. However, don’t try to squeeze in a whole tour of Europe during this timeline. Set reasonable expectations of what you want to see and accomplish it in this timeframe.
Step 2 – Pick a destination
This step will be very dependent on what type of traveler you are. For some, certain destinations have been at the top of their travel lists for a very long time. As long as you have the time to make it happen, picking this destination completes this step easily. For others, picking a destination may be more difficult.
If you don’t have any destination ideas, do a little image searching on the internet. Go through websites like this one (link to our Itinerary Library), Pinterest, Instagram, or other travel websites. Find locations that are beautiful, have historic or family meaning to you, or evoke a response for an unknown reason.
If you are like me, you are interested in traveling anywhere. In order to narrow down on a destination, I generally use a couple of methods. First, consider the time of year and the weather at the destination. Alaska is beautiful in the summer, but I wouldn’t be much of a fan in February. Second, consider the tourist seasons (high, shoulder, and low season) and their impact on the cost of travel. I am heavily swayed by bargain traveling. When a fare sale or hotel deal in a particular destination comes along, I will often consider a vacation to that destination.
Step 3 – Major Transportation
The next question to answer is what are your major transportation plans? How will you get to your destination and return home? Often this involves flight plans, but could also include driving, riding a train, or ship travel. Understanding this part of your trip will determine how much time you actually have for your vacation and where you need to start and end. If you can get an overnight flight after you finish work your last day before vacation and a late flight back from your destination before returning to work, you will maximize the time at your destination.
Once you have your outgoing and return transportation planned, you will have the start and end of the vacation schedule put together. You will know when and where you can plan activities on your vacation agenda. This is very helpful for maximizing all the time available to you (especially on shorter trips).
Finally, major transportation is likely a big expense for the trip. Flights to Europe can routinely cost upwards of $500 per person or even greater in the prime summer months. However, you can regularly find good sales for these flights in the shoulder or off-season for $200 – $300 per person. Understanding this cost will shape your budget for the remainder of your trip.
As an added note, this step doesn’t include figuring out transportation after arrival at your destination. Things like cab rides, trams, subways, and even intercity train travel are something we will determine later. Most of these are small details that are not important at this point in the planning process. Even items like intercity train travel are semi-flexible. While it’s good to have a rough idea of this transportation, we will want to keep this flexible in case we want to spend more or less time in particular areas based on future research.
Step 4 – Day Planning
The next step is to understand where you will spend each day on your trip. This isn’t setting a schedule in stone, but it is instead a general outline that can change slightly with future research. Even though it can change later, it is still a good idea to roughly understand the amount of time you have in each place. An example might be if you are doing a 9 day trip to France, understanding that you want to spend around 3 days in Paris, 2 days in a countryside/winery destination, and 3 days on the French Riviera (plus 1 day traveling home).
This is the first point where you decide what is most important to see on the trip. In the France example above, it was decided that the three most important things to see were:
- The Capital of France – museums, history, and cultural landmarks
- The French Countryside – beautiful scenery, wine tasting, and relaxation
- Mediterranean Coast – beaches, Roman history, sweeping hillside towns, and a chance to visit Monaco
There is so much more that France offers. However, this is the time to whittle down the most important areas to you. Each of the places you choose will have so much to do. It can become overwhelming if you don’t start taking small steps to limit the size and scope of the trip to the time you have. In my example, places like Normandy, Bordeaux, and the French Alps weren’t included in the plan because it is too much to do in 9 days.
During planning, it will be tempting to do a day in every major city at the destination. I would strongly recommend against moving your lodging every night. This movement can quickly erode the time you have to experience your destination. Also, you will find yourself exhausted from the constant movement of your luggage. Consider day trips if the other destinations are close. Alternately, spend a little more time in a city to go a little deeper and experience the culture and destination.
If eliminating places is hard to do because you want to see it all, putting together a list for a future trip can be helpful. This way you can remove places from this trip without feeling like you will never see them in the future.
Step 5 – Initial Research
Now that you have your number of days and the areas of interest identified, the next step is to research what exactly to do in each spot. Here, some specifics of your vacation will start to come together. Despite some specifics forming, don’t get too detailed. This step is focused on getting a list of potential activities together for each destination. While you don’t want to end up with a list of 50 activities for two days in a city, it’s alright to have a few more activities than will fit in the schedule at this stage.
This is the step where you should consider the whole universe of activities that you want to do at a destination. This includes activities like hiking, kayaking, museums, landmarks, tours, culinary experiences, beaches, relaxation, and many more. Don’t limit yourself at this point in the process.
Step 6 – Detailed Research
Detailed research is going to be the step that takes the most time to plan a cultural vacation. This process starts with the list put together in the previous step.
Take each area individually and examine the list of activities. Pick out the highest priority items from the list. These should be the top two to four activities that you couldn’t visit your destination without seeing. For these top activities, start doing research on what visiting each of these places involves. The type of information that you want to be looking for is:
- Where is this located on a map of the city?
- What does admission cost (if required)?
- Is a reservation or timed ticket required?
- What are the hours of operation?
- Are their ideal times to go?
- What is the optimal amount of time to spend at the activity?
- Any other comments on how to best experience the place.
Once you have all this information, start to place the activities into an agenda, schedule, or itinerary. It is generally easiest to use a word processor, like Microsoft Word, to assemble this schedule. You will want to identify roughly the time you will be spending at each activity. It is also helpful to collect any other pertinent information to remember for the future such as ticket requirements or notes on how to experience the place.
With the top priority places put into the schedule, go back to your initial research activity list and identify the next two to three places of interest to you. Using the same methodologies as before, gather more detailed information on these places. Now that there are items on the schedule, pay particular attention to the locations and distance between activities. While you can move scheduled activities around, this is harder the fuller the schedule gets. The location of activities is also very important in this planning process. Taking transportation back and forth across a city or region wastes a lot of time and costs additional money. For this reason, do a lot of activities within one area. It is even better if they are within quick walking distance.
Keep repeating this process until most of the timeslots are filled. As you fill the schedule, don’t forget to account for meals and travel times between the activities. Finally, don’t feel like you have to fill every single second. It’s good to have some buffer time and flexibility in the schedule. You may go to one museum that isn’t interesting after hour one, but there is another activity later in the day that you want an extra 30 minutes. Give yourself the flexibility to do this in your schedule.
Overall Tips
As mentioned earlier the detailed research phase will take the most time by far in the planning process. It also happens to be the most tedious because the details matter when you start to lay your plan into a schedule. The below are some good tips to keep in mind as you build your next vacation:
- Detailed Research May Not Be Enjoyable – It’s understandable that many will not find research enjoyable and some will be overwhelmed by the process. If this is you, use our Itinerary Library as a resource. These can make some great starting points. If there are one or two items on the itineraries that aren’t to your liking, substitute those activities and you are left with a great vacation.
- Give Yourself Some Buffer – Buffer time in the schedule is always a good idea. With several years of experience taking trips based on itineraries like this, there are many activities that are not properly accounted for in the schedule. As an example, you may wait in a line to buy tickets at a museum that cuts into your time to experience the exhibit. Another example is that travel times reported by Google Maps between activities are often best case scenario. Most of the time, you won’t arrive at a station or be ready to go right when the tram, subway, or car arrives. A good rule of thumb is to round up activities to the next 30 minutes and transportation to the next 15 minutes.
- Retain Your Initial Research List – The initial list of activities that is the starting point prior to prioritization is a good list to retain. If you finish early at an activity or if you need to change up activities the day of travel, this list is a great resource to select a filler activity.
- Organize and Format the Itinerary in a Useful Way – Your itinerary should include pertinent information like exhibits, ticket information, transportation information, confirmation numbers, etc…
Bottom Line
I am a big fan of cultural travel. One of the best parts of traveling, in my opinion, is the exposure to different areas of the world. The sights, traditions, cultures, and way of life are different in much of the world than in the United States. Cultural travel is a great opportunity to appreciate the world around us and be thankful for what we have.
While cultural travel is great, planning this type of trip is undoubtedly harder than a relaxing beach vacation. Hopefully, the outline above makes this an easier process. At the end of the day, make this process fun – visualize the destination, don’t over-stress about making it “perfect”, and include your travel partner/group in the experience. I wish you the best in your travels to come and hope to see you out in the world soon.
