Nervous About Your First Trip? How to Plan So You Feel Ready

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On our first couple of overseas trips together, my stomach churned for days before we left. Some of that was nerves. Had we organised everything? Would we leave something important at home? Looking back, though, most of it was excitement.

If you’re nervous about travelling for the first time, that’s completely normal. Most first-trip nerves come from not knowing: what to book, whether you’ve missed something, what it will actually be like when you get there. You can’t plan away every unknown, but you can plan away most of them.

Below are the six steps we follow on every trip so everything’s sorted before we go, including the simple booking tracker I use. There’s a free copy you can download for your own trip.

Why feeling nervous before travelling is normal

Feeling nervous before your first trip isn’t a sign you shouldn’t go. It usually means you care about getting it right, and that you’re about to do something new.

For most people, the nerves come from the unknowns. Have I booked everything? How will I get from the airport to the hotel? What happens if something goes wrong? You can answer every one of those before you leave, and each answer takes a little of the worry away.

It’s also worth knowing that nerves and excitement feel surprisingly alike. In a series of experiments, Harvard researcher Alison Wood Brooks found that people who told themselves “I am excited” before a nerve-racking task did better than those who tried to calm down. That churning stomach before your first trip may be more excitement than you think.

If worry is stopping you from travelling at all, it’s worth talking to your doctor. Planning helps with everyday nerves, but it isn’t the answer to everything.

1. Choose a first trip you can relax into

The first step is choosing a trip that matches how much you want to organise, and how much you want to handle once you’re there. Get this right and every step after it is easier.

When friends tell me they’d love to travel but don’t know where to start, I tell them to answer three questions first:

1. How much time can you get off?
2. How much can you spend?
3. What sort of trip do you want?

Those three answers rule out a lot of options straight away. Then pick somewhere you’re genuinely drawn to, and check your government’s travel advice for it before you book. We go through how to narrow it down in How to Choose Your First Overseas Destination.

Next, decide how much support you want:

• Plan it all yourself. You choose everything and travel at your own pace, but you’re also the one who sorts it all out.
• Have a travel agent book it for you. A travel agent organises all your bookings, and you’re still independent once you’re travelling.
• Join a small group tour. Someone else looks after transport, accommodation and much of the itinerary, and you still have people around you. For a nervous first-timer, I think a small group (around 12 people or fewer) is a great middle ground.
• Book a package that does it all. When we toured Canada with APT, it booked our flights as well as everything on the ground. You turn up at the airport, get on the plane, and the rest is done for you.

When Darren’s mum and her sister wanted to see New Zealand’s South Island, they didn’t want to drive themselves, and we didn’t feel comfortable with them doing it either. A tour was the answer, and they loved it.

A first trip doesn’t have to be a big adventure, either. A week at a beach resort is a perfectly good first trip, and a gentle way to find out what you enjoy. If you’re not sure what suits you, What Kind of Traveller Are You? can help.

2. Book the big things first

Once you know where and when, book the big things first. For us that’s international flights and accommodation, then any trains or flights between places. With those locked in, you know you can get there, you’ve got somewhere to sleep and you can get from place to place. Everything else builds on that. Before you book somewhere to stay, our guide to choosing safe accommodation covers what we check.

How much you book ahead depends on the season, and on how much you like to have sorted before you go. We visited Iceland in September, just as the peak summer season was ending, and booked every night of our road trip before we left because we weren’t sure we’d find places to stay otherwise. It was the right call, but we’d have liked more time in the Westfjords and the north, and with everything booked we couldn’t stretch it. On our road trip around Ireland, we booked accommodation about two days ahead as we drove, which left us free to stay longer wherever we liked.

For a first trip, I’d lean towards booking more rather than less. Knowing you’ve got a bed every night takes a lot of the worry away.

Some things can easily wait until you’re there. If we arrive and find a day trip we hadn’t thought of, we book it then. On trips that are pure downtime, we book almost nothing in advance. At Koro Sun Resort in Fiji, we booked a half-day trip around the island once we’d arrived and worked out what we wanted to do.

If booking it all feels like too much, you don’t have to do it alone. Planning has got on top of me once. We’d left our Northern Scandinavia trip late, booking about two months out for a winter trip in northern lights season, when some places were hard to get. I was trying to confirm accommodation before booking flights, and it was all getting too hard. So I handed it to a travel agent we’d used before. We sat down and planned it together, and she put holds on things while everything else was sorted. She booked our flights, accommodation, the trains and flights between places, and some of our activities.

I’m a bit of a control freak and I’d always rather book it all myself, but it’s handy to have a good travel agent on call when you need one.

Lisa’s Tip

If you don’t feel confident booking everything yourself, use a travel agent, but still keep your own booking tracker and check each booking against it. That way you know nothing’s been left out.

3. Keep every booking in one tracker

Whether you book it yourself or someone books it for you, you need one place that shows it’s all done. For me that’s a simple spreadsheet, and it settles my nerves more than anything else. Even now, after many trips, I still worry about whether I’ve got everything booked, and the tracker is how I know. Darren knows what we’ve booked, but I look after the bookings, so the tracker sits with me.

Here’s how I use it:

• Before I book anything, I put in every date of the trip, from the day we leave home to the day we get back.
• As each thing is booked, I fill in its row: what it is, who it’s booked with, the booking reference, the cost, and whether it’s paid or still to pay.
• Every night has its accommodation listed, so a missing night stands out straight away.
• I keep it on my phone and on paper.

As I go, it doubles as a reasonableness check. Reading down the list, I’ll spot things like: we land at 8.00 pm, but we haven’t sorted how we’re getting to the hotel yet. Far better to find that at home than at the airport.

The “booked with” column is worth having. If something changes, you know straight away who to contact, whether that’s the airline, Booking.com, GetYourGuide or the hotel directly. Before we leave, I go through the whole thing one last time.

4. Sort your first day

The first day is where the unknowns pile up, so sort it before you go. Know how you’re getting from the airport to your accommodation, and have it booked if you’re arriving late.

Being able to get online as soon as you land helps too, for maps, messages home and finding your way. When a family member was getting ready for their first big trip overseas, the most useful thing I helped with was sorting an eSIM and a VPN, so they had a connection and security from the moment they arrived. We use Holafly eSIMs ourselves, and Should I Use a VPN Overseas? explains why a VPN matters.

Where we can, we arrive at night, check in and start fresh the next morning, wandering near our accommodation and planning the day over breakfast at a café. On days when we’re travelling between places, we don’t book anything except the travel itself, so there’s time to do something in the morning or get our bearings when we arrive.

If you’re heading somewhere for a day, work out how you’ll get around once you’re there. On a trip to Japan, we booked a day out to Mount Fuji but hadn’t thought about getting around once we arrived. We sorted it on the day, with the local bus around Lake Kawaguchi that let us hop on and off along the way, but it was a bit of an “oops” moment.

Mount Fuji from Lake Kawaguchi, Japan.

5. Have a backup plan

Part of feeling ready is knowing you can handle it if something does go wrong. You won’t plan for every possibility, and you don’t need to. You just need to know you’re covered and who to call.

Travel insurance is the big one, and we never travel overseas without it. On a trip to Italy for a family wedding, Darren’s suitcase, with his suit and my dress in it, didn’t arrive. We bought new outfits and claimed them on our Cover-More travel insurance afterwards, and the claim was paid without question. It’s the only claim we’ve ever made, and it’s exactly why we always have cover. If you’re not sure what it covers, What Is Travel Insurance and Do You Really Need It? explains the basics.

Your tracker is part of your backup plan too. If a flight is cancelled or a booking falls through, the “booked with” column and booking references tell you exactly who to contact. We keep copies of everything we’ve booked, electronically and on paper, and the tracker is the front page to all of them, so there’s no digging through emails.

6. Accept that a few nerves will stay

Planning won’t make every nerve disappear, and it doesn’t need to. After all these years, I still check I’ve got our passports and paperwork five times on the way to every trip: before we leave the house, when we get in the car, on the way to the airport, when we get to the airport and before we check in. I don’t think I’ll ever stop.

What has changed is how much I worry about forgetting everything else. Most of the time, if you leave something at home, you can buy it when you arrive. Somewhere remote, maybe not, but in most places it’s easier than you’d think. The things you genuinely can’t replace on the way are covered in our International Travel Documents Checklist.

And when you land somewhere completely new, you’ll probably feel a little unsure again. That’s normal too.

You’re more ready than you think

Feeling unsure before your first trip doesn’t mean you’re not ready. Choose a trip you can relax into, book the big things, keep it all in one place, sort your first day, know you’re covered, and let the rest of the nerves turn into excitement. When you’re ready for the next step, the Plan stage of First Journey walks you through each part of booking your trip.

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