Someone recently asked us how Preston and I so regularly prioritize travel and make travel work for us. I had truly never thought about this, but when I went to text her back, I suddenly realized I had so, so much I wanted to say about our efforts to prioritize travel.
This is never something I set out to do, but somehow we find ourselves in our early 20s and very dedicated to travel and exploring how we can sneak it in as regularly as possible. As I was writing it out, I thought it would make the perfect blog post, and my friend agreed!
How to Prioritize Travel
I think most of these tips are going to come back to this- to prioritize travel, you need to keep travel top of mind. If you never think about or consume traveling content on a daily basis, you’re never going to be looking for ways to incorporate it into your daily life or be overcome with wanderlust. Here a few ways we keep travel top of mind:
Keep Travel Content in Your Subscription Box
This is one of my top tips for prioritizing travel. I am an avid Youtube consumer, and a big majority of the accounts I subscribe to are based on travel. Even the non-travel focused accounts I follow are usually still somewhat frequent travel sharers, and that helps spur me to plan trips and focus on new destinations just about more than anything.
Here are the best travel accounts I follow on Youtube and Instagram
Flying the Nest– If I had to recommend one single travel content creator, this would be it. Australian, husband-wife du0 Stephen and Jess have been traveling the world full time for years. With more than 1 million subscribers on Youtube, they are now sharing their van-life loop around Australia with their adorable daughter Hunter. Before the pandemic, they hopped from every major destination and uncovered gem you could possibly think of, leaving thousands of travelers inspired in their wake. They have inspired sooo many trips for me, and I can’t wait for the world to fully open up again so I can start executing the international trips they have put me on to!
A few others,
Helene In Between – one of my favorite and most thorough travel blogs!
Renee Roaming – a very dreamy and inspirational Instagram account.
Sign Up for a Travel Email Service
If you’ve never heard of Scott’s Cheap Flights, I have an entire blog post dedicated to it because I love it that much.
Basically, Scott’s Cheap Flights (SCF) is a member-based travel alert program allowing you to input your home airport, preferred travel dates/months, preferred destinations and more specifications to tailor the best international travel deals for you– sent directly to your email inbox. I even paid $25 (bought when it was discounted) to gain access to SCF premium, aka domestic flight deals, and we saved hundreds on flights for our upcoming trip to Wyoming. Already paid for itself!
On top of flight deals, SCF also sends little travel summaries of popular and hidden locations straight to your inbox for you to learn more about. I love these, and I love looking through the deals to just plan out all the theoretical trips we could take when I get a new deal delivered to my inbox! It can be extremely tempting to book everything if you don’t have self control though!
Find Inspiration from the Classics
A lot of my trip inspiration has come from favorite books and movies. During the very early days of the pandemic, we booked and planned an entire trip to Nova Scotia, Canada just so we could explore the land of Anne of Green Gables- we never got to go because in hindsight, thinking the pandemic would be completely fine again in a year was ambitious. We also planned our entire honeymoon around Harry Potter, and I’m dying to go to New England in the fall for all the Gilmore Girls and Little Women reasons.
Drawing inspiration from books and movies is so fun. If no one has reminded you recently, you can go to the places you read and dream about in your favorite fictitious settings! Whenever I am watching a dreamy movie, I make sure to add the destination to our running list of destinations we want to visit.
Keep a Travel List
Speaking of lists, it’s so nice to have a running list of about 10 or so destinations we want to visit. I am not a big fan of using the term “bucket list” because it can definitely make you feel like a failure if you don’t accomplish everything on the list.
I have these destinations saved on a note in my phone, and then I have corresponding “save” folders on Instagram to keep specific cities and activities in the countries and states at the top of mind if a trip or flight deal for one comes up. Then, we feel immediately inspired and don’t have to pose the question, “well what are we going to do in that country?!”
Keep a Specific Bank Account Dedicated to Travel
One of the biggest hurdles to making frequent travel accessible is the cost. Traveling can definitely be expensive. It doesn’t have to be, but more often than not, those big, once-in-a-lifetime trips cost more than what you would normally spend if you were going to stay at home instead.
We like to have one specific bank account dedicated to travel costs. This helps us easily be able to book trips when a deal comes through on Scott’s Cheap Flights, and we don’t have to spend as long saving up and worrying about making it happen financially. Paying over an extended period of time by adding money to that savings account makes it a little more gentle on your bank account.
Don’t Overlook Weekend Trips
Weekend trips are underrated in my opinion. Just search “Best weekend trips near me,” and allow Google to creepily auto-populate extremely relevant trips! Weekend trips alleviate the need to ask for vacation time from work, spend a lot of money on accommodations and usually can be accomplished without flying. If you can go on 1o epic weekend trips or only one big vacation, you might get more bang for your book on the weekend trips!
Gift Travel
If your significant other or members of your family are also dedicated to helping you travel as much as possible, asking for travel or money as a gift is a great idea. You could ask for a SCF membership, a gift card to your preferred airline, and airbnb gift card, etc!
Instead of spending money on each other for things (we dont need) for Christmas each year, Preston and I go on a big trip instead. This ends up being the same cost as what we would spend on presents, but through this we are able to make memories and go without using a ton of vacation time. That sounds like a win, win to me!
Those are my top tips for prioritizing travel. I hope this helps inspire you to keep travel top of mind like we do! It’s truly the only gift that keeps on giving, and we are better people because of it.
If you want to follow more of my travel content, see my recent trips and my six weeks spent studying abroad in Italy, make sure to check out the travel tab on my blog! I also share my travels live on Instagram.
And, I will just leave this reel here to let you in on the secret that I still have to beg Preston to go for travel more often if we’ve been wearing it out for a while, haha!
These are great tips! Love the one about having a travel fund set aside—I just set that up myself and it makes it even more fun to dream about travel knowing I have funds set aside for it!