Travel Planning Tips That Will Make you Happier

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, your happiness expert, and I’m coming to you from the Las Vegas International Airport, McCarran Airport. It’s an excellent airport. I’m on my way to Canada on a vacation and a little bit of business there, and there’s a lot about traveling that can be stressful and difficult, but the planning of traveling is almost invariably happy-making. So, that’s what this video is all about.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So, I’ll see if I can go away with being masculine for a few minutes in the airport while I do this quick video. Look, there’s some interesting scientific surveys that really were done to promote the travel industry, but they still have very interesting, and frankly intuitive findings. And that is, that planning travel makes us happy. In fact, the planning of travel for 95% of people, in and of itself, alleviates stress, starts to give some relief from our day-to-day life, and the challenges that we’re in. And that, to me, is fascinating.

And I think I’ve done some work on this before, maybe a video a long time ago, about the fact that when we anticipate future happiness, we basically import happiness into our lives now for something that’s in fact scheduled for the future. So, as we fantasize about travel, as long as it’s somewhat realistic and we can see where we’re going and what we’re going to do, who we’re going to be with, all of that can bring happiness into our present place. And of course, the other fascinating thing about this is that most people find that simply having the formality of the planning, the ticket book, the date in their calendar, the boss having given them the time off, all of that is highly effective at making us feel like the vacation is real, it’s become much more tangible.

Now, it can also be quite stressful when we get to the moment when we need to travel. There’s too many things to do at work, there’s the worry about travel arranging, somebody to water your plants and all that kind of crazy stuff. And one of the things that’s very interesting that I learned from previous work I did with a company named Travel Zoo, was that the earlier people planned for that kind of stuff, the less stressful that was as well. And like, duh, makes total sense, but often that’s the kind of thing that we’re thinking about at the last minute. Like, in the week before we go, who’s going to water the plants? And is the doggy daycare got space for our puppy? And who’s going to drive us to the airport? All those kinds of things. And instead, if at the time that we do the booking, we do this planning for all the other little pieces that we need to do, that in and of itself can make the small but really critical arrangements that we need to do much easier.

So, that’s my advice to you this week. Plan your vacation. It’s the time of year when we all want to be doing that, and so why not think about where you want to go, put it in your calendar, get permission for the time off, and then go ahead and book that vacation. And make all the little arrangements about dogs, plants, getting to the airport well in advance, and you will be on your way to a stress-free, happy vacation that you can start, frankly, in the planning stage. You get to borrow future happiness into the present moment just when you start planning. That’s all I’ve got for this week. Hope you’re having a great time. Hope you’re getting away for some vacation yourselves this summer, and I’ll see you next week. Thanks so much. Bye for now, you.