Travel planning has been gradually shifting from the domain of experts to the domain of an ever-growing amount of travelers’ experiences, and it will continue to grow in that respect in the years to come.

With the advent of the Internet, most travel bookings and travel research have moved into the online space. Guidebooks are excellent resources on the road, but they quickly become outdated when the Internet is constantly updated with newer and more accurate information. User-generated sites such as wikitravel.org are updated by locals and travelers as soon as new restaurants, hotels, and bars open, and these people also are able to “vote” with the information they put online. Other booking sites now rely on the reviews of other travelers, and services like Twitter allow instant broadcasts of what travelers’ are experiencing. With all of these resources available, online travel planning is the best method. Here are some of the best sites to use:

o Wikitravel.org is one of the best travel sites on the web. Modeled after Wikipedia.org and easily searchable by location, and offers the most up to date information available.
o The Thorn Tree travel forums moderated by Lonely Planet are legendary. Tens of thousands of travelers that have almost certainly seen and done whatever trip you are planning are more than happy to lend a helping hand.
o Kayak.com is an airfare search aggregator, covering most of the world’s major airlines. It will find the best prices based on your travel preferences, then take you to the site of the carrier to easily book your flight.
o Hostelworld.com is the king of cheap accommodations. With over 10,000 network hostels, the website has budget locations all over the planet, all searchable and ready to book online.
o Couchsurfing.org is a fantastic website both for connecting with locals while traveling and securing free accommodation. The website allows people to host travelers all over the world for free, and they often serve as tour guides and the perfect local guidebook for a place.

A lot of the above websites have the common factor of user-generated content. This is increasingly becoming the determining factor for travelers. The reasoning is that most magazine and guidebook reviews are paid, so reviews posted by other travelers are inherently more trustworthy. Taking a look at a guidebook published 6 months ago on a city like Buenos Aires and comparing it to the Wikitravel.org page is like night and day. The old methods of travel planning have been replaced by the immediacy of the Internet and the amassed knowledge of other travelers. As more and more people gain Internet access, even remote places will have locals that can dispel myths and misconceptions about travel in their hometowns and areas.

This spread of information will make travel planning easier and easier, and also more accurate. I have planned all of my trips abroad using solely the Internet, and it is by far the most efficient method.

Local Authorities now require that a Travel Plan (otherwise known as a Green Travel Plan) be submitted with a planning application for many types of development in order to ensure that the new business or facility actively looks at ways of minimising traffic impact.

This will usually aim to reduce single occupancy car journeys by staff travelling to work. In some cases a customer travel is also included within the document.

London Travel Plans required by Local Authorities within the Greater London Area must be written in accordance with Transport for London and the Mayor of London’s specific Travel Plan Guidance.

There are also a group of west London Boroughs who deal with Travel Planning together under an umbrella organisation called Westtrans and Travel Plans in those Boroughs are dealt with by Westtrans officers.

All London Boroughs are aiming for the same result’ to cut traffic and congestion within the city and reduce the need for parking by encouraging staff (and sometimes customers) to use public transport, walk or cycle. The art when writing a Travel Plan is to demonstrate you are helping to achieve these goals without committing your client to expensive measures both short and long term.

This requirement has been in place for a number of years now and the content and quality of Travel Plans, particularly in London, are now given much more scrutiny than in the past. Often within London, a developer is seeking to reduce parking on their site or in some cases provide no parking at all and in these situations a bespoke, practical and well written plan can be key to achieving planning permission.

The challenge in all cases is to balance the commercial demands of the business whilst formulating a robust and detailed plan which is frequently key to securing planning permission. For example I recently dealt with a new hotel with zero on-site parking. This meant that both staff and guest travel to the site needed to be actively addressed through a range of specific measures to discourage car travel.

In contrast I recently dealt with a hotel which had free on site parking. In this instance I had to devise a travel plan which demonstrated active steps to reduce the demand for those parking spaces over the initial period of 5 years.

Both sites were covered by the same overall London-wide policies but the individual site issues dictated that the plans were very different. In both instance I managed to reach a solution which met my client’s commercial needs and satisfied the Local Authorities’ requirements.

The different approach and requirements in each case demonstrates that a template is a misnomer. In my opinion the templates that are available are likely to result in clients being signed up to costly and impractical measures. In terms of cost, as the plans are monitored for at least 5 years, the management costs going forward can also be significant if not considered at an early stage.

In my experience travel plans prepared at the application stage are all too often a standardised document which is not fully considered, with the result that developers inadvertently agree to a range of measures in order to get planning approval. Those measures may be inappropriate, expensive to implement and difficult or costly to monitor.

The examples cited above demonstrate the importance of producing a plan which is specific to the site and to the end user, not least to prevent the added cost of having to re-writing the document. In both of these cases the original developer obtained agreement to a draft which, if implemented, would have resulted in significant costs for the end-user.

In order to meet the requirements of the client and to satisfy the Local Authorities it was necessary to re-write the documents in a way which delivered practical and value for money measures for my client but also satisfied the requirements of the Local Authorities. I like to think that my experience in this area helped to achieve a result which all were happy with.

Travelling is really a wonderful experience, it helps us relieve from stress and allows us to relax and enjoy ourselves away from our work. But don’t get too excited, before you can actually go on vacation, it needs thorough planning before you can actually enjoy.

Do you know why planning is a very important thing if you want to go on adventure travel? Carefully read through this paragraph to know why. First of all, if you plan to go on hiking to an unknown area, you should see to it that all of your paraphernalia are complete and intact including boots and other safety materials. And before setting of to unknown remote areas make sure to contact at least one tour guide that knows very well the local language so that you and your team won’t have any problems communicating with the locals, in case they don’t know how to speak English.

Are you aware that an adventure travel is more expensive as compared to an ordinary vacation? Yes of course, here are the reasons why is this so. First of all, there are few only a little number of people these days who are expert in the field of adventure travel thus they can demand the price they want to guide you to your adventure travel, but they will do all the planning, and guide you through correct and safe route and book you a safe and comfy place to stay during your whole travel adventure. And these people are really in high demand nowadays so this is the reason for the high prices. And we all know that in remote areas transportation is really difficult to find. Hence, you need to plan each and every single detail ahead of time. And you can do this all online and it might be helpful if you research a little bit about the place where you will have your adventure travel.

It might help if you ask your friend or family member who are also into adventure travel because they might give you some useful information regarding the place you are about to go.

Before going on traveling you need to know or ask yourself what type of traveling do you want to experience. Most of the people today, want to relax in a high class hotel and just stay there and relax in order to help them relieve from the everyday stresses they encounter in their work place. On the other hand, some individuals or families really want to go on adventure travel like hiking, caving, zip line, exploring the forest and many more.

The first choice is the easier one to do because hotels are very accessible and you can easily book online for reservation. We all know that adventure travel is really a challenging one, you really need to do is to plan ahead of time for the adventure travel.

By following these guidelines, for sure you will enjoy your adventure travel. Plan now, and travel tomorrow!

Layaway travel plans hold the answers to making that dream vacation into reality. There are so many ways where you can enjoy the benefits of this payment plan, like spending your honeymoon at a romantic destination or taking your family on a Disneyland trip. And if you plan ahead, the more chances you have to make the most out of layaway travel plans.

You probably know the drill about layaway travel plans by now. It normally involves choosing a vacation package plan that you want, and then pay an initial deposit to start the planning process. The remaining balance would be spread out over a certain period, like a bi-weekly or monthly payment. There are no interest rates or -it simply works at your own pace and convenience.

So, how do you go about to experiencing the greatest vacation of your life? Finding a reputable travel agency is a good place to start. A great travel agency would mean that they’re legit (that will take a diligent background check), their layaway policy works to your advantage, and they carry the best travel consultants and packages. Their consultants should be able to guide you through the whole process and find you the best deals on the vacation you want.

Almost every family dreams of a Disney vacation, which is quite hard to save up for. That’s a fact that most people have probably lamented over and over again. It’s also really hard to find a travel company that offers a layaway for this - well, except for Disney cruises. Fortunately, Disneyworld offers a somewhat layaway payment plan - it is not really officially called like that, but it still works the same way as any travel layaways out there.

This Disneyworld “layaway” payment plan all takes place online. You should buy the packages directly from their official website. After you’ve signed up and created an account, you can go ahead and pay for the $200 or 10% initial deposit (there’s no interest rates or extra charges for signing up) at the time of booking. After that, you have the freedom to pay as much as you want and any time that’s convenient to you. The only thing that you have to keep in mind is that you have to pay for the whole amount 45 days before the trip.

Your Disneyworld account profile will help you know the status of your payment activities. You can also pay for the vacation through this site. If you think about it, this payment plan might not be technically termed as layaway, but you’ll still enjoy the same benefits of not spending for the whole vacation on the spot.

There’s really no reason why you can’t take that well-deserved vacation today. All you need to do is to look at the right places for the solution - like in places where you can take advantage of great layaway travel plans.