Ask HN: What's your process for touristic travel planning?

- check wikivoyage.org (not wikitravel which is a commercial spin-off). Especially the "getting there" and "getting around" sections. Useful is a place has multiple airports. wikivoyage also has best info on getting from airport to inner-city and its costs, sometimes better than the airport's website.

- check climate diagram (average monthly temperatures at day/night) to guess what clothes to pack

- check Ministry of Foreign Affairs (in the US I guess that's the State Department). In my country they publish lists, one per country on visa requirement and current affairs, e.g. security incidence, lately also COVID-19 requirements and restrictions

- seatguru.com open while booking a flight. To avoid sitting next to the toilet

- https://www.avuxi.com/topplace/location-page to figure where the shopping and night-life areas of a city are on a heatmap. https://www.google.com/travel/hotelsmap has similar map layers one can switch on

- Before the actual trip I check just about everything: pricing of public transport, location of ATM in the airport arrival area, where to best exchange money, scams and areas to avoid

When I travel with a bicycle the planning gets even more complex

I've generally found planning a trip very laboursome, and I think it's something that I could improve on.

Main thing I'd like to improve is discovering activities or attractions in a destination area; I've seen people use travel guide books, like Rough Guides or Lonely Planet: might explore that; also, heard of for-hire travel planners (Rough Guides seems to have a service, for example), which would be awesome, if the planning was actually high quality and well tailored (anyone has experience with that?).

A tip I have is that kiwi.com has better search functionality than skyscanner, and their support is great. I use their search functionality with very loosely defined parameters (e.g. from [country] to [country or region or continent] any time), and gradually hone in on the parameters I'm interested in. And their support was a breath of fresh air when my flight was cancelled with a notice of ~1 hour and I needed an alternative itinerary: they put me to the front of the queue in their call center, and gave me plenty of options and helped tailor a custom itenerary based on my specific circumstances, all that for ~1-5 euros commission when first buying the ticket.

Generally

1. Read a travel guide (like Lonely Planet or Rick Steves) for an idea of an itinerary

2. Read travel itineraries on Reddit or Google search

3. E-mail travel writers from the guide books and book a paid 1 hour zoom session to refine itinerary (I have found this to be extremely helpful)

4. Create a google docs and sheets of the itinerary

A new thing I've been playing with is ChatGPT to generate an itinerary