From the title of this post you probably assumed that it is about married couples traveling, but it isn’t. Instead it’s about traveling with a friend, sibling, other relative, or even someone you don’t know well but who is brave/foolish enough to consider going away with you.
Traveling without the expectation of sex means you will be tempted to be yourself – be careful with that! We have been traveling together all of our lives. There were many years when Blonde would sing in the car on family car trips to get Brunette to pay her to stop. This was a profitable scheme (which is why it worked for so many years) but it would not be attractive behavior in an adult. (It wasn’t in a child either, but we’ll overlook that.)
After traveling on 6 continents together and never killing each other we have some expertise. So, in no particular order these are matters to consider when traveling with a companion.
Who’s paying for what?
We are each willing to donate points or miles or whatever we have that is needed to make the trip better and less expensive. But you may want to track things carefully. There’s an app for that – of course. It’s called Splitwise .
We use a free version and each have it on our iPhones. You can use it for two people or even a large group in case you’re the chump who decided to rent a beach house for 18 people. It will keep track of who owes whom what. You friends don’t have to join it – they only need to be in your contacts and it will send them an annoying email reminding them that they owe you money or vice versa.
What are we doing and when?
We each have parts of an itinerary we tend to book. Brunette does cars and hotels not covered by points. Blonde does day trips and hotels covered by points. We each do our own flight arrangements and very soon neither of has a clue who booked what, when it is, or what the confirmation number is. Then we do long, and oddly resentful, email searches trying to find our e-crumbs.
Enter another app! This one is called TripIt and it’s great to use whether or not you’re traveling with someone else. There’s a free version which is fine and there’s a paid version with some nice additional features (like letting you know if you’re eligible for a fare reduction). Try the free one first because it has the basics.
This sucker is ridiculously clever. Say that Blonde books a flight for our upcoming trip to Dublin. When the itinerary comes back in an email she merely forwards it to plans@tripit.com and it miraculously knows whose it is and assigns it to an existing trip (other things for Dublin in that time period) or creates a new trip.
You can very easily set up someone to share it with and it builds your itinerary for you. We don’t have the faintest clue how it works and don’t care. It just does. Once in a while you’ll send it something and it will send back a sort of “WTF”? message and you might have to enter that activity manually.
(One word of caution is to keep your calendar on the correct date. An unnamed Blonde once changed her calendar to Catalan time and screwed things up so much that two unnamed and distressed sisters tried to check out of a hotel a day earlier than planned and then had to email a friend in the U.S to confirm what the date was. More than once.)
You’re checking your bags? You want to carry everything on to the plane?
You don’t have to make the same choice with this life-altering decision but it’s good if you do. If one person has only carry-ons that person is ready to get going as soon as you land somewhere. That person will also have what s/he brought and, when necessary, will have a decent chance of making a connecting flight after Customs.
The checked baggage person will be considerably less miserable going through Security and walking through the airport and onto the plane. That person will also be tempted to overpack. If you pack it you have to be able to carry it – period.
Prior to checking a bag be sure to snap a couple pictures of it that you can use to describe it if (ha ha) it gets lost.
That leads smoothly into stating the obvious; the person who checked their luggage may very well not see it at the other end of the line. Airlines lose, damage and delay impressive quantities of luggage every day. It’s almost a point of pride with them that they can now charge you to lose your possessions. When that happens you need to stand in line waiting for someone with a severe and untreated personality disorder to take your info and then begin the wait and many calls it will take to eventually be reunited with your luggage.
After having a suitcase delivered 6 days later and soaked in jet fuel in Turkey, a canvas bag driven in an open-air delivery truck through a drenching rain in Tuscany and a bag that caught fire being dragged on a luggage truck, we aren’t keen on checking on the way over. We do often check our stuff coming back because we’re totally sick of it. But after missing recent connecting flights back in the U.S. checking luggage on the return trip isn’t seeming like such a bright idea either.
Why are you doing making noise at 6:00 a.m.? What are you doing with all of the lights on at midnight?
If you’re planning to share accommodations and you have different internal clocks you will need to figure out how to work that out. Earplugs, eye masks and some Ambien (to slip in the other person’s drink) can be your friends.
Can you both drive the car you rented?
Luckily we both learned to drive on the same stick shift VW bug. And we learned in hilly, twisty Pennsylvania so are generally competent even though we drive automatics in “real life”. You can save a lot of money if you can drive a stick and probably save on fuel too. But don’t make assumptions about what the other person can drive or you could be stuck doing all of the driving.
What foods cause you to emit noxious fumes or frightening noises?
Avoid such foods or you (completely hypothetical situation here) could fart so loudly after eating eggplant that you not only wake up your sister who is in another bed, but terrify her into a PTSD relapse (from having watched a war reenactmant that went on forever). Hypothetically. In Girona, Spain. If it indeed happened at all.
Make sure you have another friend/sibling/whatever to replace the one who may hate you after the trip.
Ideally the generous sharing and use of some of our tips will prevent this from happening, but you never know! Always have a Plan B and a sense of humor no matter what you’re doing!