Anna is a co-founder of Adventure in You and has been traveling the world for the last 9 years. She has spent time living in Thailand, Mexico, Indonesia, and Spain and is our local expert in these areas. Her expertise on travel, gear, and building businesses have been featured on Foundr, Business Insider, Yahoo Travel, and more.
As much as I love to travel (heck, I travel for a living), I absolutely hate trip planning. Over the years, I’ve caught on to my partner’s happy-go-lucky attitude towards travel and very rarely plan for things in advance. Let’s face it.
Trip planning is time consuming, stressful, and can definitely be overwhelming at times. Unfortunately, every time I go to Europe, I need complete travel itineraries due to visa restrictions on my end. This means that everything from our route and hotels has to be mapped out.
Given that we’re planning on spending six months to a year driving a van across Europe, you can only imagine the amount of planning I am faced with. With that in mind, I decided to look into Routeperfect, a free online DIY trip planning tool that helps travelers create their dream trip based on their travel preferences, budget, and personal style.
One of the things I love the most is that there is no cookie-cutter itinerary being recommended to everyone. Instead, you can be your own travel agent and opt to travel Europe your way. All you have to do is input your country of choice, trip length, and www.routeperfect.com will do all the work for you. As soon as you do this, it will automatically create a trip itinerary which you can fully customize according to your preferences.
Want to experience fantastic nightlife or would you rather see beaches and nature? Are small cities your jam or would you rather see historical sights along the way? All you have to do is move the sliders according to your preference and Routeperfect will automatically update your itinerary for you.
Customize by Travel Style
Aside from being able to customize the itinerary based on interest, you can also indicate if you’re traveling as a family, solo, with friends, or as a couple which will help the platform make better recommendations on places to go.
I personally LOVE the customizable features as it allows me the chance to explore beyond the capital cities which are often recommended in most guidebooks and trip planners. Instead, I can look into the possibility of visiting places that I would never have considered otherwise. Speaking from experience, every UK itinerary that I’ve looked at always recommended stops in London, Cardiff, etc. However, as soon as I toggled and played with the control sliders using their interest options, I was immediately presented with small town alternatives.
After you’re happy with the trip itinerary that has been generated for you, you can then ask them to price the trip, which can allow you to save up to 20% due to the hotel packages and bundle deals that Routeperfect prepares for you. The best part is that you can easily indicate your travel style and budget before they quote you on hotels.
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Another great feature, if you don’t know where to start planning, is the pre-designed Routeperfect Europe Itineraries which has been created by their experts. However, as usual, these itineraries are fully customizable, allowing you to create the perfect trip based on your interests.
I used this feature and was immediately presented with a best-of-the-best in each country which is pretty handy. Want to see the best of the French Riviera? You can use their base itinerary to help you start planning.
Aside from this, you can also check out loads of other people’s testimonials and see the exact route that they took, allowing you to see tried and tested itineraries to help jump start your trip planning.
Putting Routeperfect to the Test
Planning My Trip
As mentioned, I wanted to see first hand how exactly the platform worked. What better way to test it than by actually using it to plan our trip to the UK? As mentioned, we’re heading to the UK to do #vanlife and one of our first stops will be exploring the areas surrounding Wales (where my partner is from). With that in mind, I stretched the trip out to 30 days to see what itineraries it would suggest.
As usual, the usual big cities popped up but as soon as I played with the interest options, I was immediately directed towards smaller towns. When I click each section, I am also presented with some information on what to do in the area which is super useful.
If I switch over to manual mode, I can manually input different locations which I personally want to go to. Personally, the best part about this is the fact that it shows you the distance between each location as well as the approximate drive time. As we are planning to travel around in our van, this information alone is reason enough to bookmark their website!
Booking My Trip
As soon as I was happy with the itinerary that I’ve generated, I was keen to see how much the trip would cost, given the savings that Routeperfect advertises by booking all the hotels at once. As mentioned, as soon as you can customize your budget accordingly, the correct type of hotel recommendations will be given.
Do you prefer to travel in style? Select the luxury option and you will instantly see a variety of 4-5 star hotels in each location. You can then search through their recommended hotels and read Trip Advisor reviews straight from their platform. To me, this is pretty powerful as it really does make it a one-stop-shop where you can plan, read, compare, and book.
I do have to note that Routeperfect doesn’t show the price of each hotel as it bundles them all up, giving you access to hidden rates (hence the 20% savings). Although I personally would love to see how much each hotel costs, the fact that I don’t have to worry about booking individual hotels throughout the duration of my trip is a huge time saver.
From their booking platform, I can easily select the hotels that I want and toggle through the options that are presented within my price range.
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Overall, I think it’s a great tool to help people plan their European Trips. The interface is easy enough to use and provides you with immediate results according to your travel style. For me though, the best feature of this platform is the time-saving aspect. What would have taken me days, if not weeks of planning, scouring through guidebooks and blogs, took me only a couple of hours. For busy travelers, the fact that you can plan and book things directly with just one button makes Routeperfect an awesome tool for anyone planning a trip to Europe.
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