I love planning travel it extends the enjoyment so much more.

With a relatively short time away, just over three weeks in July, we have settled on a highlights tour! We are landing in Munich via Dubai, and then onto Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Edinburgh, London and Paris before returning home.

Having settled the itinerary it was a matter of sifting through the hotel sites and recommendations to identify places to stay.

Using a combination of

Trip Advisor and Tablet we were able to identify hotels that come well recommended for almost all locations. We used Tablet to book last year when we went to New Zealand and found the concierge service really helpful as we looked for information, made and then tweaked our bookings. Only our Dubai stopover and Edinburgh were not able to be booked on Tablet. The bookings for all but Dubai are cancelable if we have a change of mind.

With the hotels sorted we need to think about how we will get around. We have always enjoyed train travel and so we will use trains to get around mostly, with a flight from Berlin to Edinburgh. The flight was easy to organise using the Skyscanner App.

I have always found the thought of train bookings quite daunting. I don’t know why but it seems so much harder than booking a flight!

I found an amazing site called The Man in Seat 61 which has the answer to every possible question you could ever have about train travel in Europe and the UK. It’s awesome! Over a few days I went back to this site over and over again.

With all the background information I set about booking buying the ubiquitous Eurail Pass. We have a 5 day 3 country pass which gives us a little flexibility for a day or two extra travel if we need it. Using an App called Rail Planner we were able to see a reliable timetable so we could make reservations for all of our travel in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic as well as London to Paris.

I understand why it is now so much harder now for Travel Agents to make their money. The answer to the questions are there on the internet and often provided by someone with vastly more experience on the particular issue than the local travel agent.