How Do You Plan Your Food Trips? Five Solid Tips...

We're constantly asked and have written about it previously, but here's the up-to-date, inside steer on how we plan our gastronomic travels

Most people believe that being a food and travel writer is an all-expenses-paid ‘round the World jolly of freebies, flight upgrades, lavish resorts, remote castle stays and anything-goes press trips. Maybe it is for some in staff roles who solely write for glossy print publications but it certainly isn’t the world we find ourselves operating in. We’d surmise that 85% of our travel is at our own booking, planning and cost. We joke we get “one sole international press trip offer a year” and, funnily enough, that’s how it has chalked out. Taiwan, Porto, Malta and Chicago, one-annually over the last five or six years. The rest of our travels abroad are of our own doing, and, to be honest, the organic (for want of a better word) trips are the ones which often land most solidly with readers.

Whether it’s the inside steer on where to eat in Lisbon, traversing Northern Italy to hit several different cities via train, finding the best fritkots and beer bars in Brussels or documenting the beauty of southern Sweden, so much of our travel expertise has come from graft and consistency, rather than a two or three-day press trip to dip in and out and purport a proper command on a destination. With that, we’re often asked “how do you plan your trips?” which really means: “how do you find all those hotels and restaurants” with a little dash of “what are the things worth seeing and doing in between meals” thrown in, too.

We travel via our tastebuds and gastrotourism has always been our niche, so it’s no surprise our readers always want to know our particular approach and replicate on their own trips. Nearly six years ago we wrote this article on gastrogays.com offering 11 tips for planning travel like us, however we’re now going to streamline and surmise this with our most up-to-date insights and five crucial pieces of advice to consider.

1. Don’t get the early flight

That 5:30am departure might be a tempting, rock-bottom price and you might convince yourself that arriving at your destination early - so as to have a “full first day” - is a smart idea but let’s work backwards:

• How will you get to the airport at 4am? Affordable public transport is thin on the ground at that hour, even in cities. A private taxi might be your only option, which can negate some flight cost-saving.

• A full seven hours’ sleep before a busy first day with a crack-of-dawn departure means you would need to be asleep by 8pm the night before, thus impacting your day before departure.

• Are you skipping breakfast at home and buying something extortionate at the airport or on the flight? We’d always recommend a good breakfast to set up your day at home first and wolfing down that in the middle of the night isn’t a wonderful feeling.

• When you land at 9am and check in is at 4pm, what are you going to do with yourself all day? Sure, drop off the bags and chance the earliest check-in possible, but that unnatural 3am wake-up is going to hit you hard around lunchtime and you’ll probably be grumpy, tired, sticky and sore, craving a shower, a fresh change of clothes and maybe even a nap yet having to wait until late afternoon in some cases.

• Early to rise, early to bed. Come 8pm that 3am wake-up will have caught you out. Cut to you conked out before dinner, one of the best parts of that first evening, so you’re not really getting a “full” day.

We know “ideal” flight times are often charged at a premium but sometimes a flight the night before (yes, annoyingly paying for an extra night’s accommodation) or a more natural mid-morning or lunchtime journey will stand you in much better stead and won’t zap your energy or completely skew the days spent exploring. Sometimes YOU are the collateral damage when it comes to a “cheap” flight.

2. Loyalty: One or none

Here’s the thing with loyalty accounts, rewards schemes and frequent flyer incentives: they are designed to reward keen loyalty. These schemes work best when you’re consistently hitting targets and the rewards are relative to the amount of trips/stays you take, rewarding the effort you yourself put in. Why would they offer a great big discount to a flaky, so-so, sometimes customer? It doesn’t make business sense…

Our advice is always to find the scheme that works best for you and work hard at it to reap rewards, rather than spreading yourself across a hundred schemes and trying to level up each one simultaneously. Whether that’s a particular airline (or airline alliance, the big three spelled out below), a hotel chain or even using a specific booking system time and time again, habits breed reward.