10 Travel Mistakes to Stop Making Today

We don’t claim to know everything there is to know about travel and travel mistakes, but we’ve learned a few things over the years while living on the road and planning long, elaborate holidays. In this article we’re going to discuss what we think are the top 10 vacation mistakes travelers consistently make and offer our best travel tips and vacation advice.

Now these mistakes are more cerebral than they are literal. Stumbling into the wrong part of town while drunk is obviously a huge travel mistake. We’re going to assume you’ll avoid this situation, as well as leaving your luggage unattended in public, marrying strangers, and forgetting to wear sunscreen.

Our goal is to improve your overall experience on vacation, not to protect you from getting physically damaged by locals or the sun.

That is, except for when we write about Detroit. Our Detroit articles offer literal protection, which you can learn all about HERE. We are definitely looking our for your physical safety in Detroit.

Seriously, we want you to return home gushing about all the incredible things you’ve seen, done, and thought about on your adventure because that’s what we do and it fills our lives with joy.

So here our our top 10 travel mistakes. We believe that coming to grips with these ten things will dramatically improve your holiday time away from home. Thanks for reading!

Stop Making These Travel Mistakes Immediately

1. Failing to Research Ahead of Time

If you’re going to spend the time, money, and energy to get yourselves somewhere new, you might as well prepare the best possible vacation for yourselves. Otherwise you’re at the mercy of hotel concierges and their brochures.

We’ve had far too many dialogues with people who went somewhere amazing and came home with dull reports of listless endeavors and missed opportunities.

Try this before your next vacation: Into your web browser type, “Best things to do in <insert location>” and read 7-10 different articles. Figure out which sights and excursions appear on multiple websites and make a list of the coolest stuff.

To narrow the list, google search, “Is <insert attraction> worth it?” and read the results. Then enter the locations into Googlemaps.com and see which ones are too far out of the way.

Trim up the list and get excited about every minute of your vacation. It’s an easy thing to do, but it’ll take a handful of hours.

2. Sleeping in too Late

This is the number one vacation mistake because it affects the entire experience and is made by the majority of people. The bottom line is this: If you don’t show up early you’ll find yourselves stuck in the hoard that arrives after breakfast.

And the sucky part is that crowd is getting bigger every year. You know why? Because there are more people on the planet every year.

Want to travel like a professional? Get up at 06:00 or earlier. Show up before the place opens, or even before the sun comes up. Try to be the first one there (which is hard — there’s a lot of nuts out there).

You know why this is important? Because you won’t spend your day standing in line. Parking will be quick and easy. You’ll beat the heat of the day, and you won’t be stuck in a waddling crowd of poorly dressed tourists clogging up your photos.

It’s much more enjoyable to hike the trails of a beautiful setting when you aren’t in a river of people. If you hit the trail around sunrise you’ll have an entirely different experience.

Almost everything is better before the crowd arrives (sporting events are different). When you’re driving away after an amazing morning you can wave goodbye to the mile-long line of cars trying to squeeze into the parking spot you just left behind. Once you learn to skip the suffering you’ll never go back.

3. Settling for the Ordinary

Every tourist destination has a sunset cruise, shark tank, zip-line, waterpark, shopping town, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, Ghost Tour, Local Zoo, Children’s Exploration Center, etc. Unless this particular region has a superlative one, give it a pass.

The goal is to learn what is different about this location than other locations? Perhaps it’s a National Park. Perhaps it’s an especially beautiful beach. Maybe it’s a fantastic downtown like Charleston, or a majestic mansion like Biltmore in Asheville. If you’re in Colorado Springs you have to drive Pike’s Peak. And if you’re in upstate Wisconsin, the Apostle Islands simply must be kayaked.

Whatever makes this region special, do those things. The other things can be done wherever.

Never Forget: A well-planned itinerary of marvelous excursions will shine in your memories forever. Mediocre waterparks are not memorable. Aim as high as you can.

Ironic Note: Parasailing (pictured above), isn’t the most original thing to do, but its definitely worth doing once, especially if you’re in a beautiful locale like Destin, Florida.

4. Failing to Make Reservations

There are countless tourist attractions where you can just show up and buy a ticket. It is helpful to know which ones they are, because the others should be reserved in advance.

If you want the Crown Tour of the Statue of Liberty you better book a couple months in advance. If you just show up empty-handed in your light pink Yankees hat you’ll be groveling with the rest of the worms at ground level.

Mammoth Cave offers an abundance of tours, as do Wind Cave, Carlsbad Caverns, and all the other amazing caves in the USA. If you’d like to enjoy one of these limited space ancillary tours, book a week in advance. Many a family has grown a very long face after being told by the park ranger that there are no more tours available today.

If you’re gonna take a ferry over to Okracoke Island in North Carolina it is advised you don’t pull up and expect to catch the next lift. You might be sitting there awhile, or turning around. Book in advance and you’ll have no issues. That goes for all ferries everywhere.

When you plan your next vacation anything that can be reserved should be reserved in advance. Open the web browser, google search for tickets, enter the credit card info, and lock that experience/tour/ferry ride down.

Avoiding These Travel Mistakes Comes With Experience

5. Saving the Best for Last

Believe it or not, this is a top vacation mistake. There is no grand finale on vacation because too many things can affect how you’ll feel by the end. We’ll give you a few ideas of how your vacation could dramatically change between the first and last day:

Someone gets sick, injured, or arrested. Everyone becomes tired. People get cranky and argue. Weather turns foul. The car breaks down. Someone gets robbed or loses their wallet. Career responsibilities or family responsibilities force the vacation to end early.

If there is a definite highlight to your holiday, do it early. Don’t put pressure on yourselves to have fun at the end when there’s a high probability you’ll be exhausted. Reserve the last few days for relaxing events and coast out gracefully.

The last thing you want to do is cancel the best part of your vacation because no one is in the mood when the day finally arrives.

6. Overbooking Excursions

We’ve learned this one the hard way over the years. There is a saying in the industry that people often need a vacation from their vacation. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it means you played hard. However, overbooking your time with activities will eventually suck the joy out of the events.

If you choose a dynamic enough destination there will be more things to do than days allotted to do them. We can’t do everything unless we have an abundance of time and money or we decide to cram the vacation with excursions.

Many vacationers do their best to pack every single day with things to do. This is a top vacation mistake. Trust us, please. We’ve made it so many times.

When you find an itinerary on the internet that schedules every day of your vacation from morning to night, those people are either making it up or they’re running a business. No experienced traveler would recommend that because it’s far less fun to vacation that way.

Plan an agenda-less down day at least every three days, and consider doing it every other day if your excursion days are packed full. We try to limit the activities to one-per-day unless proximity indicates it’s logical to package events together.

We’ve lived on the road the past three years and this has become more and more important. We can sleep when we’re dead, but let’s not kill ourselves on vacation. The more it feels like work, the worse everyone’s mood becomes.

7. Too Much Movement

This is another vacation tip that comes from experience. We are embarrassed to report that this concept took us quite a few years to come to grips with, (and we still violate it half the time).

If you’re spending all your time in one location this is less important, and any violation of the concept would take the shape of an overstuffed itinerary, which we’ve already discussed.

However, if you are roadtripping or doing lots of day trips from a central hub we’ve found that driving from place to place, packing and unpacking, starting the day early and ending late, etc., at too fast of a pace will wipe out the fun and feel like work.

We spent a week in Sandusky, Ohio — don’t ask why — ok, fine, I’ll tell you why. There were four things we wanted to do: Rock n Roll HOF, Cleveland Art Museum, Cedar Point Rollercoaster Park, and Cuyahoga National Park. We had 6 days to do four things, which meant we had two days to grocery shop, do laundry, and sit around.

But Sandusky was one hour from Cleveland and three of the things were over there. So we drove back and forth between Cleveland and our RV Park day after day. By day four we were wiped out.

Three to four days in a spot sounds like enough time, but we’ve found it isn’t. Even a week can feel too rushed if you’re trying to squeeze in a lot of things.

We recommend fewer stops, more down days, and keep the day trips close to lodging (unless you’re a maniac, then by all means go for it).

8. Using Your Phone for Photos

I’m just gonna say it: Phone photos are weak and seldom express how amazing something truly is. They simply cannot capture the detail like a legitimate camera. If you want a blunt vacation tip here it is: Buy a camera.

We recommend everyone who likes to take photos invests in a decent DSLR or mirrorless camera and then learn how to use it.

Beautiful photographs are like found treasure, and you’ll cherish them for the rest of your days.

However, be careful. The next thing you know you’ll be inclined to start a stupid website just so you have somewhere to put all the pictures. And there goes your free time.

Learn to Avoid These Travel Mistakes When You Can

9. Forgetting to Craft a Contingency Plan

You just never know when something is gonna be closed. Like we stated earlier, we showed up to Jewel Cave with tickets for a tour and the Ranger who was gonna give the tour didn’t show up to work.

We planned a 5-day roadtrip up the Big Sur Coast of California, and right before we got there, wildfires lit the whole place up and half our attractions were closed.

What are you going to do in these situation? You guessed it. Follow the contingency plan.

When creating the itinerary for your vacation you should have researched an abundance of things to do. And some of those good things didn’t make the cut. Don’t throw those unused ideas away! They are the back-up plans when things change.

For some reason certain people will decide they don’t want to do something at the last minute. They’ll say something like, “I don’t feel like doing that.” This is balderdash to me, but meaningful to them, so keep an assortment of options available for when plans come apart.

And if you travel enough you’ll learn that things absolutely come apart.

10. Failing to Review the Map

So, I’m a map nerd and my most visited website is googlemaps.com. This travel mistake may not make or break your holiday, but it’s worth mentioning. Whenever driving on vacation it is helpful to pour over the maps between your lodging and where you’ll be going each day of the trip.

With googlemaps you can “drop a little man” into the map and look at the street from a camera view. This allows you to get an idea of every potential tricky part of your commute, from the parking lots to the general flow.

If you’re driving something large like a motorhome we consider this a quintessential step. In a car it is less important, but still helpful.

It’s always nice to be aware of the route you’ll be taking that day, especially in foreign countries or on islands with iffy road conditions and in large cities where the traffic can be overwhelming.

A Final Map Vacation Tip: Sometimes when you get a look at something from the camera view on Googlemaps it helps you decide the excursion isn’t worth your time. You’d be surprised how many things sound great in a description or look great in a perfect photo, but the unfiltered visual falls far short.

An Honest Conclusion for Top Vacation Mistakes

There is a large contingency of travelers who avoid all of this by parking their butts at an all-inclusive resort. They do this because it can be overwhelming to organize and execute a superlative vacation. The pressure is too much and a Caribbean cruise is so much easier.

For the rest of us we can either put in the effort or take what gets handed to us by our concierge. We can research a few local restaurants that everyone loves, or we can eat at Crab Shack and The Melting Pot. We can drive to the amazing location that people seldom discuss, or we can zip-line across the forest like every other monkey on vacation.

Do you want the same vacation as everyone else? If yes, be our guests.

Or would you prefer to have an amazing adventure you’ll be gushing about a decade later? We fall into that later group and we hope you do, too.

Adventurous travel has changed our lives. We see our country and the world with new eyes because of our research and our experiences. Life has never been so exciting because new people, places, things, and ideas are always coming our way.

You get out what you put in, honestly. If we research, plan, and drag ourselves out of bed early, we’re gonna have an incredible journey.

Thank you for stopping by our website! We are the Hoffmann family, a full-time RV family that has split residence in Seattle, Washington and San Antonio, Texas. We have special needs children that we homeschool, and work travel assignments for the Veteran Affairs Hospital. If you would like to learn more about us, check out our Start Here and Biography pages.

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