Travel Decision Fatigue: What You Need to Know
What is travel decision fatigue and why should you even care about it when you’re traveling? Most people don’t know what decision fatigue is or even realize when travel decision fatigue is happening to them, which makes it hard to get out of that funk.
So, first. Travel decision fatigue is when you’re constantly having to make new decisions and it becomes difficult to make these over and over and over again. The decisions you make on a regular basis at home are much easier because these are usually repetitive decisions. When they’re brand new decisions, like on your travels, it becomes very tiring and overwhelming.
These are not always the big decisions like “what hotel am I going to stay at” or” where am I going to go?” It’s the small little decisions you need to make all of the time on your trip. Things like “do I go left or do I go right”, “should I go straight or should I turn around”, “should I go to this cafe or that cafe?” These micro decisions will also impact some bigger decisions as well.
As you can see there are a lot of different little tips and tricks that you can use to eliminate travel decision fatigue and enjoy the process of planning and then have an amazing trip. When you are ready to plan your trip, you want to have my FREE TRAVEL CHECKLIST in hand to ensure nothing goes wrong on your trip. Inside I go over the TOP 10 things you should do before you go on your trip. Grab your FREE TRAVEL CHECKLIST HERE.
When you are constantly making all these new decisions, it can make you very irritable, indecisive, overloaded and your good decision making skills will decrease. This can wreak havoc on your trip as it can stop you in your tracks when you get overloaded with the amount of decisions that you’ll end up just not knowing how to move forward. On top of that, you’ll get exhausted more quickly than you think.
To combat travel decision fatigue, you want to set some things in place so that you can help yourself out.
Travel Decision Fatigue Tip #1
When you’re in the trip planning stage, leave yourself enough time to create and plan your trip. You don’t want to necessarily plan your whole trip in just one day. Decision making becomes very overwhelming and trip planning requires a lot of decisions to make. So the longer you give yourself to plan out your trip, the easier and less stressful it will be.
Travel Decision Fatigue Tip #2
When planning your trip, block out your time and spend it on specific things. If you are planning to trip plan on Saturday, determine one thing you’ll focus on, like booking my accommodations, or decide on the activities I want to do in one city. When you can group items into smaller chunks and be able to plan it out that way it will make decisions a lot easier and you’ll be able to go ahead and book those plans.
Travel Decision Fatigue Tip #3
If you’re traveling with others, get everybody involved in the decision making. There are always people that leave all the decisions up to you, saying “I don’t know, whatever you think will be great”. They either don’t want to make a decision or they just go with the flow. It’s great to go with the flow but everyone still needs to make some decisions. When the travel decisions are all on one person, it becomes very exhausting and it will get that one person very annoyed, very quickly.
To avoid this, make sure that you talk to your travel companions and tell them you want them to be included in the decision making and explain why. This way, everyone can make some of the decisions about the trip and then the micro decisions, like where to eat and which way to walk, while you’re on the trip.
Travel Decision Fatigue Tip #4
A big part of travel means eating out a number of times throughout your trip. I recommend looking up and deciding on certain restaurants you want to check out. Having these decisions and options ready for your trip will cut out more decisions you need to make on your trip. This doesn’t have to be every place that you are going to go to and I wouldn’t suggest that because sometimes you just happen upon different areas that you want to eat at, but have a handful of places on a list that you can refer to. This way you know they are not going to be the typical tourist place where they overcharge you for crappy food, plus you’ll also know you like the menu.