HOW TO TRAVEL: We’ve looked at the Who, What, Where, When & Why of travel and you may be wondering “how the heck to do it”. There are as many ‘How’ questions as there are travelers and I’ve used two approaches to addressing issues that may come up: 1) through this blog I’m providing you with 365 travel tips – one for every day of the year; and 2) this posting on how to do research so that you may find answers to your questions.

When doing your travel research, you’ll find that sources of information come in many different media including: websites, guidebooks, newspaper travel sections and magazines, non-travel news media, on-line blogs, local residents, people who’ve traveled there, literature and technical books. Sorting through so much information to discover what is relevant to your travels requires focus and organization.

You focus by:
• Having a clear sense of your travel style: luxury all the way, middle of the road, or good value.
• Creating rules of travel for yourself to ensure you get what you want out of your travels. Examples of rules of travel include: visiting only countries where English is spoken; good food & wine; no cold weather; modern countries only; short flight times, etc.
• Drawing up a list of places you want to go and ranking these based on your needs and missions.
• Avoiding being distracted by all of the information you uncover by referring to your travel style, rules of travel and list of places to go.

You succeed at research by:
• Using more than one source of information to balance various biases and get a clearer picture.
• Finding a way to organize the information that works for you so that you never have to go back to research something you’ve already uncovered but have misplaced. Ways to organize include: by destination, by activity, by cost and by amount of time needed for the trip.
• Documenting your findings either on paper or on your computer – these must be organized so that you don’t waste time looking for information.

Here’s a recap of the steps to take to make sure you will travel in 2010:
1. Make a New Year’s Resolution to travel in 2010.
2. Answer the Who, What, Where, When, Why & How questions.
3. Think of issues that make planning difficult & organize by importance or degree of difficulty.
4. Consider ‘Where’ sub-questions to research destinations, issues and strategies.
5. Figure out the ‘What’ questions and answer.
6. Ask ‘Who’ to travel with, learn from, get local knowledge, and/or trust when traveling.
7. ‘When’ to travel: make a plan to take advantage of every opportunity to travel.
8. Know ‘Why’ you travel to get the most out of the experience and to try something new
9. ‘How’ to travel includes how to do research as well as reading the 365 travel tips on this website which give you pointers on handling issues related to: destination, transportation, accommodations, eating, activities, health & safety, and packing.

With this ninth posting, we wrap up the New Year’s Resolution series of blog entries.

Doing research and organizing your findings will help answer your questions about traveling. You can learn a lot from professional and amateur travelers with books, websites, magazines, speakers and a plethora of information sources and subjects available (click on the thumbnail for a full image – a new page will open):

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