Top New Year Resolutions for Travellers and How to Make Sure You Keep Them

A new year is upon us and almost everyone we know is making resolutions for a better next year. As we promise new things to ourselves with the aim of promoting satisfaction in all aspects of our life, it is essential that we give our travel goals priority as well. While covering more miles, seeing new and exotic locations and creating everlasting memories are goals worth chasing, it is important to lay out a blueprint of how we are going to reach our goals.

To help our travel brethren, we list below top five travel goals that you can have for New Year 2018 and how to ensure that you strike them off your list:

Travelling More

Leading magazines have listed the best locations to visit in the New Year, and you have circled the ones that interest you the most with a bold marker (at least in your mind). Phone calls have been made to friends and the prospect excites them as much as it does you. But by the time the year ends, you have hardly covered any destinations you originally planned to. Déjà-vu? You are not alone. It is common for plans made at the beginning of the year to not materialise for lack of leaves from work, coordination or plain procrastination. To ensure that this doesn’t happen to your plans for 2018, make sure you have identified your annual leaves right at the start, and have a plan in place to use your vacation time holidaying. Some people even book tickets and hotels in advance to make sure that they keep up to their promise. As the idea is to keep yourself accountable for your plans, ensure that you can count on support from friends, family relatives or even colleagues and bosses to nudge you towards vacationing during most holidays.

Packing Light

We’ve all dreamt of travelling the world with nothing but a backpack in possession in the style of frequent globetrotters but somehow whenever it concerns our own vacations, our bags end up looking like inflated balloons that can burst any time. Guilty? Here’s the solution. In the New Year, start by following the rule of trinity for clothes – one for packing, one for washing and one for drying; ensure clothes take only one-third of suitcase space as well as pack multi-purpose items such as a sarong, a parachute cord etc and travel wearing items that you see taking the most space in your suitcase.

Staying Healthy While Travelling

Gone are the days when holidays were a pretext of stuffing our stomachs full with all sorts of greasy foods, ditching our workouts and returning home with puffed cheeks indicating several pounds gained. As the travel has become more frequent, it is necessary to have your own set of food rules to guide you during your journeys. While a little indulgence is harmless, it is essential to stick to your diet on most days by booking hotels that allow meal preparations, packing healthy ready-to-eat food items and searching for healthier local eating options at the place of your travel.

Getting Off the Grid

As the social media widens its grip on our lives, it is becoming harder to detach ourselves from its influence and find moments of peace, away from the humdrum of checking our feeds mindlessly and staying on the edge about latest comments on our pictures. If you truly want to ‘escape’ and enjoy your holidays off the grid in 2018, ensure that you carry only essential travel gadgets with you. You could also try switching off your phones and laptops for the longer course of your holiday and keeping in touch with your family and friends only through landline number of your local stay. If you want to go there, you can consider deleting all social media applications from your phone.

Responsible Travelling

As the world gets closer and distant places become accessible to general populace, time has come for us as travellers to make responsible choices so that we don’t go about harming the planet for our personal adventures. Lowering our carbon footprints, respecting the local culture as well as flora and fauna, choosing sustainable accommodation options, shopping and eating locally produced foods as well as minimising our waste are some of the ways to achieve this goal.