Planning a Long Distance Walking holiday

 

I have already touched upon planning a holiday in my post on How I Walk/Hike/Tramp.  I think I need to go into more detail on the planning process that I go through and hopefully by doing so I give you some pointers on planning your own walking holiday.

First I look at potential LDWs, deciding on whether I would like to walk them based on whether the walk has interesting scenery.  I also look at whether there are other walks that start near the end of a walk I'm already interested in.

I research each walk to see if there a baggage transfer company that services this walk, and that they are reasonably priced.

Once I have a list of potential walks I draft up a rough order in which to do the walks, avoiding train journeys when I can, or ordering the walks so the train journeys between walks work out to be the shortest possible, and thereby less expensive.  This process has been refined more as I plan each holiday.  Also, now knowing that purchasing stages of a train journey separately often works out cheaper than letting the algorithms decide on the connections for me, helps with costs.

I have a very complicated Excel spreadsheet (that has evolved over time and over six U.K. holidays) that allows me to put in walks, overnight stay locations, each day's distance, potential accommodation, baggage company information, travel information, costs & other budgeted amounts, totals, and with a colour-coded system that gives quick information about what the status of potential accommodation is at (if I have contacted them and am awaiting a reply, if they are within my budget, if the booking is confirmed) and what is available at each overnight stay (wi-fi, grocery shop, pub, laundry services and, more recently, availability of toilets/showers, consecutive nights at the same location, and staying at the same location on non-consecutive nights).  Note, the image above is one for my 2019 holiday.  The new version has several improvements and is more complicated.

The spreadsheet is an obsession for me during the planning process, with me (now) spending hundreds of hours moving things around and updating individual pieces of information as I discover something new or get a reply from someone I've contacted.  I have recently been planning my 2023 U.K. walk (the longest yet at 103 nights) for months and still have 27 night's accommodation, baggage transfers for 10 walks, flights, and train tickets to organise.

My first walk, in 2013 consisted of using B&Bs (not airBnB) and a few days at the house of the brother of a friend of a co-worker.  The holidays since that first one have moved slowly away from B&Bs (almost mainly due to increasing costs) to rely more heavily on hostels and bunkhouses and, for the first time, this year's holiday will utilise camping for the majority of the overnight's as a way to keep costs down.

In the beginning stages of planning, I will reject walks if I can't find affordable overnight accommodation in places that make sense for daily distances.  I can walk a fair distance each day, so am pretty flexible in working through problems with where to stay to keep costs down and how far to walk to achieve that.

I have also learned to think a little more creatively.  One thing that I now consider (and what probably should have been obvious from the outset) is spending more than one night at the same accommodation somewhere along the walk if there is transportation that can get me to and from that overnight stay from other points along the walk (essentially using that accommodation as a base while walking more than one section of the walk).  Another thing I am considering for the next holiday is whether I can complete some shorter (4-6 day) walks with just a day-pack and what can fit into it (leaving my larger rucksack stored somewhere to collect after that walk is done).  Another solution for a walk that I am doing this coming year, is to utilise train stations as ways to essentially "leap frog" my rucksack from one overnight's accommodation to the next, which requires 2 short train journeys each day in addition to that day's walking - of course, this only works if you are essentially "walking the railway line," which I will be doing.

Those are most of the things I take into consideration while planning.  You might wonder why I spend so much of my own time on the minutiae of planning a holiday, rather than just contacting one of the many walking holiday companies to do it for me.  One reason is to keep the costs down (using those aforementioned companies more than doubles the price of a LDW).  I've also mentioned elsewhere that I enjoy the planning process (probably because I've always been a problem solver) and it helps increase my anticipation for the holiday to come.  If you are doing the planning for your own walking holiday, I hope you enjoy the process as much as I do.