Travel Planning - unmet need?

Thanks, always good to see useful travel articles. Funnily enough, my experience with eSims in Europe was extremely discouraging.

So thanks also for reminding me I intended writing an article about it!

Hi Mike, sorry just went into this thread to respond to another comment and realised my response to you was still sitting there as a draft. I've reached out via twitter DM as I prefer to not broadcast my email here.

Can make time for a chat next week, am very busy with a Touchgram release the next few days as well as the added load of travel planning (ironic). We had to book our flights and lock down the start/end dates but have a few weeks for the rest.

I'm still planning the first week in Scotland and it's been an interesting example of the kind of juggling I'm talking about.

For different legs of the trip, there's a need to build up different scenarios and comparing them should be easy.

With my spreadsheets, I typically plan the routes via Google Maps and save them and then save pictures of them into a big Evernote note so I've got at least the basic route if we find ourselves offline. We try to buy local SIM cards for data to have maps working, and use Google Maps app offline mode to have cached the maps for the areas. When estimating drive times, I've consistently found if Apple Maps says longer than Google then it's more likely to be right, especially on twisting roads. I save drive times and add an allowance for sightseeing stops - that's going to be much bigger when it's a road you can pull over on with decent views, compared to 5 hours on a freeway.

Planning

We have a hard "start point" of arriving in Glasgow at 12:45.

We want to be at my brother's house the next day.

There are two ferry routes to his island, one route with a 10:30 and then 17:30 departure. The other route has a 14:10 departure.

Option 1

The rail journey we'd like to take is from 8:30 to 12:30 but if we take that we would need to get a one-way hire car from a regional town. That seems difficult - only one provider offers that service and we're waiting to hear back from them. If we take the railway, we need to stay overnight the first night in Glasgow. That scenario means the next day will be a bit pressured:

• rail 8:30 to 12:30
• time to get hire car
• drive to ferry by 17:00 (3 - 4 hrs drive depending on stops), need to be there 1hr prior ferry leaving to ensure meet checkin by 45mins prior depart

Option 2

The alternative is to hire a car from Glasgow and follow much of the same journey.

• This gives us the flexibility to stay outside Glasgow the first night, so can do part of the journey then
• enables catching the earlier ferry via different route the next day (get there by 13:10) - attraction of arriving in late afternoon rather than after dinner & closer to sunset

Very happy to give it a try. I'm not after something that optimizes routes but just makes it easy to juggle them after we do the research. So we need to manage a bunch of alternatives.

For example, say we have a fixed date of a show we want to see. Typically we work backwards from that - 3 days in this city, 5 here, 3 there.

Then I need to work out how we will get between them - are we using trains? If so, how do we get from the station to accomodation? Is there a metro, or just use taxi/Uber? That's normally a detail we'd leave until later but you can't ignore it, otherwise you find yourself with suitcases and 4 hours to kill in a city.

That scenario of the trip to Scotland might end up anchored around the limited rail journey times and the ferry times, working out if we need to spend a night somewhere on the way. Getting flights that align funnily enough is often easier than the rail trips, as there are many options of flights arriving at given times.

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