Planning Travel

How We Planned a Year of Travel

"How did you actually plan this?" is one of the questions we got asked most before setting off, and it's a fair one. A year of travel sounds huge when you're staring at it from the start. In reality, the planning came together in a handful of fairly simple stages.

We Started With a Broad Region, Not a Fixed Route

Rather than trying to plan an exact itinerary from day one, we started with the region we were most drawn to: South America. That decision on its own shaped a lot of what came next, because it meant we could travel largely overland rather than relying on flights between countries. Buses and long land crossings became the backbone of the trip, which kept costs down and meant we saw a lot more of each country along the way, rather than skipping over it from above.

Research Before Numbers

Before we could plan anything properly, we needed a rough sense of what things actually cost. We spent time watching YouTube videos and reading travel blogs from people who'd done similar trips, not for exact figures, but to get a realistic ballpark for day-to-day costs in the countries we were considering.

This gave us a rough estimate of what a month of travel might cost in different places, which we could then measure against our own savings.

Working Backwards From Budget to Timeframe

Once we had a rough cost estimate, we worked backwards. Rather than deciding how long we wanted to travel and then figuring out if we could afford it, we took our total budget and divided it against our estimated monthly costs to work out roughly how long we could realistically travel for.

This turned "we want to travel for a year" into a number we could actually plan against, and gave us a framework to build the rest of the trip around.

Mapping Out Countries and Rough Timeframes

With a rough overall length in mind, we started mapping out which countries we wanted to visit and roughly how long to spend in each. This wasn't a fixed itinerary, more a loose sequence, enough to know where we were generally headed without locking ourselves into exact dates months in advance.

Keeping Ourselves Unlocked

The one deliberate decision we made early on was to book a one-way flight out rather than a return.

It meant we weren't locked into a fixed end date before we'd even left, and gave us the flexibility to extend, cut the trip short, or change direction entirely if our plans shifted once we were actually on the road. Looking back, this was one of the better decisions we made. A lot changes once you're actually travelling, and staying unlocked from a return date meant we could respond to that rather than working around a flight we'd already paid for.

If we were planning again, we'd follow roughly the same process: pick a region you're genuinely drawn to, get a realistic sense of costs before committing to numbers, work backwards from budget to timeframe, and stay as unlocked as possible from fixed dates. The plan doesn't need to be detailed. It just needs to be enough to get you started.