Welcome to part 4 of the Weekend Traveller series, a fortnightly segment where I share tips and strategies for travelling during the weekend so you can travel more without using your work leave.
Trip planning is stressful. What if you cannot eat all the food, see all the sights or buy all the things?
Actually, you don’t have to eat all the food, see all the sights or buy all the things while on a weekend trip. The whole point of being a Weekend Traveller is that you will be able to travel frequently and do all those things on multiple trips.
However, it doesn’t mind that you should throw all travel planning out of the window and wing it. The times I haven’t made plans for my weekend travel are times which I did not have productive trips (Kuching and Jakarta comes to mind) and that makes me very annoyed.
On the other hand, my Bangkok trip was almost perfect because I did take time out to plan and even make my own travel guide (that’s a post for another day).
Narrow down your travel to-do list
Once you have decided on your destination (another potential headache if you are tracking budget flights), it’s best to plan for your stay if you want to have a productive trip.
There are some who recommend not planning and just going with the flow when you arrive. This will work if you have plenty of days to spare. If you only have 48 hours, walking around aimlessly while hungry is not a good plan.
[This guide is partly inspired by Taiwanese travel writer 943 who wrote an awesome book on round-the-world travel on cheap.]
I will use my 2-day Bangkok trip in October 2012 as an example because it was my first trip there.
List down the sites you want to see. You can think big at this stage. My initial plan was to eat a lot of Thai dessert (something I didn’t manage to do in the end), visit Khaoshan Road, pray at Erawan Shrine and get a massage.
Then I realized that getting a S$190 air ticket only for a massage was not worth it and I threw in other sites based on recommendations by friends, the internet and guidebooks.
I ended up with more sites in my list: Grand Palace, Chatuchak Market, Chinatown, ride on boat public transport, Cabbages & Condoms restaurant, Terminal 21, Platinum Mall, MBK.
The updated list was much better than the first but it was too ambitious. I mean, how many malls can you visit in a day without overdosing on air-conditioning?
Narrow down your sites using a pros-and-cons list. I list down the places to go and write down the pro’s and cons of visiting it as well as what other sights are nearby. You can find out what is nearby when you have a travel guide that lumps sights based on how they are clustered.
My Bangkok list looked like this:
> Chatuchak
+ (because everyone says so)
– I hate crowds. It is far from the city. Mom didn’t like it.
Nearby sites: NOTHING
> Platinum Mall
+ Recommended by a friend, lots of people shop there
– I don’t like shopping.
Nearby sites: Erawan Shrine.
> Grand Palace
+ It’s shiny!
– Entrance fee
Nearby sites: National Museum, Khaoshan Road
> Khaoshan Road
+ Fake IDs
– Loads of unkemptly backpackers
Nearby sites: (See above)
Chinatown
+ It’s Chinatown
– A bit far from other stuff
Nearby sites: ???
Cabbages & Condoms
+ Fun name and for a good cause
– Is it in the middle of nowhere? (I later discovered that it’s very near my hotel.)
Nearby sites: ???
In the end, I added National Museum to my To-Do list and took out Chinatown and Chatuchak. Since Erawan Shrine and Platinum Mall are near each other, I decided to go to both despite not liking shopping. By narrowing down my list, I only focused on bits of the city and did not have to run around a lot.
After having your real list of To-Do, it is time to make your own travel guide. I’ll be sharing how in another 2 weeks’ time. See you!
Do you somewhere to go for a weekend trip? Which parts of the city will you focus on?
Brush up on your weekend travel skills:
Part 1: Pros & cons of weekend travel
Part 2: Where to go for Weekend Travel?
Part 3: Choosing transportation for weekend travel
Part 4: Travel planning for weekend trips
Part 5: Make your own travel guide for a weekend trip
Part 6: How to pack for a weekend trip
Part 7: How to use Foursquare to plan a day’s travel
Part 8: Why a weekend trip is the best time to start solo travelling
Part 9: I’m going to Melaka for a weekend trip
YQtravelling 
Great post! Agree that travel to-do lists are a must, even if you do decide to chuck it away once arrived. Mine saved my Langkawi weekend trip from being a failure after a disastrous start. Without my list urging me on I might have moped in my hotel room :D
i’m more into weekend travels, so this series of posts is really helpful. thanks. :-)
I agree. Travel planning is must before vacation. And if someone else( specially an expert) does it for you, then its …PRICELESS. So for my vacations I use mygola (http://www.mygola.com/search) .Its a great planning tool. They have crawled an incredible number of blogs/articles to create local itineraries for thousands of destinations, which you can then customize like mad. You can add co-travelers to your plan, post on social media and so on.
They have also got all the transport suggestions between cities(hand-curated by mygola travel experts, to recommend the best option for the traveler).
Give it a Shot!
:)