Travel Planning
I took my first big solo trip when I was seventeen, and I caught the travel bug big time. Since then I’ve traveled extensively and planned group trips for family. There are so many resources on the internet that help with trip planning — ways to find just the right hotel, restaurant, flight, sight, or tour — but bookmarking those sites is not an efficient way to collect all that deep research. Whether you’re planning a solo trip, a trip with a friend, or a tour with a group (which I’ll be doing for the first time this fall), using a Factr stream to gather and share information is the ideal solution.
With a travel stream, I’m able to research and plan a trip that I’m taking with a friend without those constant emails and texts. We can easily share and collect our individual discoveries and “must-sees”. And we’re able keep them all in one easy-to-find, easy-to-search place. Just add a link to the stream and your travel companion can review it next time she looks at the stream.
Aspirational, planning, archival: When I started using Factr for travel, I realized that I could create several types of streams. Factr gives me a place to collect my list of future destinations (aspirational) that I can share with my fellow travelers. I’m planning a trip to Morocco with a friend, and rather than emailing her every time I find out something new, I can add it to our Morocco Travel stream (planning) and she’ll be notified (if she chooses to) when there’s new activity on the stream. After we’ve returned from our trip, we’ll have our Morocco Travel stream as our shared digital scrapbook (archival), to peruse any time we want to relive our journey. In addition, we can share it with friends who are planning their own trips.
I read a lot of travel blogs and newsletters; I visit informational sites to research various travel questions, check out travel gear, and look at photos. Sometimes I’ll see an item that I want to remember or read later, but don’t know which of the different types of travel streams to put it on. I can grab those articles, lists, photos, or videos, and put them in my Factr Inbox. Later, when I have more time, I can decide which stream they’re most suited to — aspirational, planning, or archival.
Ivy, my sister-in-law, planned a trip to Spain using Factr. She collected articles on places she wanted to visit. She researched hotels and put them on her stream. She watched an episode of “Parts Unknown” and put links to all of Anthony Bourdain’s favorite restaurants on her stream. She added links to hotels and museums, historic sites, and places of interest. Once she got to Spain, she was able to refer to her stream find places to stay, eat, or visit. Now that the trip is over, she has a nice digital scrapbook, to which she can add notes and comments about the places she ended up visiting. And she can add links or photos of the places she discovered while wandering the streets of Barcelona.
Recently I’ve been working on sorting out Morocco Travel. It’s filling up with all kinds of posts, and even though it’s fun just to scroll through them all, sometimes I want to refer back to a specific post without having to scroll through the whole stream. I have a number of ways to organize the stream: tagging, folders, and titles (Display Options, under Settings gives me an alpha choice, so if I add a keyword to the titles, I can then alphabetize the posts). So far I have fifteen categories and sub-categories that I can use individually (for folders) or combine (with tags) to make each post easy to find and review. [Accommodations, Books, Dress, Etiquette, Flights, Food, Gear, Health, Language, Packing, Photos, Safety, See, Tips, Tours]. Titles (broader categories like food, see, shopping, tips) can also be used for folders. Tagging can break things down even more: under food, restaurants could be a subcategory; breakfast gets its own tag; recipes get a tag; and so on. I have category called “See”, just a general category encompassing places I want to visit. I can tag those items with city names, so that when I’m in, say, Marrakech, I can look up all the sites and restaurants I want to check out.
The stream might start out as a private stream (for a solo trip), or a stream with two administrators (planning a trip with a companion, or a couple collecting dream destinations). But I’ve found that when I talk about my upcoming trip, and other people say they’re hoping to go there soon, I can invite them to follow my stream — as viewers. It’s up to me how I share my stream and how much access I give each invited follower.
Since I started my travel stream, I can imagine other ways to use this type of stream. In the past, I’ve functioned as a travel agent of sorts, planning group trips for several generations of my family. A professional travel agent (yes, they still exist) could use Factr to collect and file information about specific destinations, and to plan trips and share information with their clients. Stepping outside of travel, this type of stream would be great for project planning or symposium/conference planning.
And you know all those piles and unlabeled boxes of maps, ticket stubs, brochures, chocolate wrappers, and business cards from past trips that are languishing on the edges of your bookshelves, waiting to be put into a folder or scrapbook so you can relive your trip or pass along your expertise to friends? They’re collecting dust, aren’t they? Do you even know where they are? Can you even find the matchbook from that wonderful restaurant that you stumbled upon? Now you can.
By Deborah Grossman
