Observations On Travel Planning

Hi friends,

It's the holiday season and I'm on vacation now. As an adult, I am more conscious of the flow of money and time committed on this vacation.

As such, I realized now that there is so many room for improvements that I should make. There were some errors that I made that costs me unnecessary expenditure that could easily be avoided if I were to plan properly. So far, here are the areas that I have to have a more thorough thought in the future.

• Public transportation cost - Period pass or pay-as-you-go? At first, the approach for this was easy. If I plan to use public transportation more frequently, period pass is the way to go. But things aren't exactly what it seems. To truly know the worth of a period pass, it is not enough to skim through the general fare price of going on the public transport. The destination matters a lot. So what may initially seem as I have to use a public transport more than 4 times to get a breakeven on the daily pass, it actually depends on destination and which transport I'm using. It's the little things like this that threw me off because I figured that daily pass is always the smarter choice but after doing some calculations, I actually overpaid for it.
• Meals - My initial plan with meal is to bring instant ingredients enough for my days of travel. However, I quickly realize that I didn't take into consideration many other factors such as small snacks during the journey and the challenges when buying groceries. Since I'm pretty much relying on public transport for groceries, especially the wet ones, I am limited to the amount of bags I can carry. This means, I have to take frequent trips to the supermarket which incurs more cost. The plan to combat this issue in the future is to probably buy a ready made food before reaching the vacation destination. That way, it is as easy as heating it up in the microwave and dig in. Initial glance at the cost analysis for this, it makes more sense to buy the ready made food because of the convenience.
• Powerbank - I have 12,000 mAh battery pack that I carry around to charge my phone. At that capacity, I roughly have 4 cycles of charge. However, colder place tends to reduce the charge of my phone  quicker than usual. Thus, if I could, I'll get a higher capacity powerbank next time.

So for now, those are a few things that I want to take note of. There's still much I can do to improve the situation I am in. 

On the bright side, I'm starting to wear a fanny pack during travel. As weird as it seems, it is actually very convenient. I have all the important stuff I need in one place and since it is wrapped around my front body, it will always be visible to me.

Anyway, the ultimate goal is to be a good planner to the point that there will be no ad-hoc expenses.

Thanks for reading, friends. Take care!