Booking Our Italian Vacation
Happy Fall everyone!
For those of you who don’t know, I recently got back from a whirlwind 2.5 week trip to Europe. I can’t wait to share with you all of the details from my travels. I will be posting all of it throughout the next few weeks so stay tuned!
But first, I wanted to share how my boyfriend and I planned this trip of ours. We have been planning on going to Europe in the late summer for a while now but knew this trip was going to be a little trickier than past ones because I also had to go to Norway for work in September. We wanted to combine the two trips to save on flight costs which added a lot of moving parts to the planning. To be honest, I got overwhelmed very quickly. I had no idea which city in Italy was the cheapest/easiest to fly into from Oslo. We also wanted to go to Croatia after Italy and weren’t sure the best way of doing that either. Staying in a Tuscan villa was also a must for this trip and I didn’t even know where to begin looking for that. I really needed help with planning this one.
Enter in Noken - I follow many travel bloggers & influencers on Instagram and noticed that several of them were posting about how they have used this travel app that customizes your trips for you. I looked it up and thought it was worth a try to reach out to them and see how it all worked. The company specializes in a select handful of countries such as Iceland, France, Japan and Italy. By simply having a 15 minute phone call with one of their travel experts, I was able to describe my trip to them, what I was looking for in my vacation and they started working for me immediately. They found me flights from Oslo to Italy (apparently flying into Rome from Oslo was the easiest/cheapest option) and then figured out how to best get to Croatia from there (you can fly to Dubrovnik from Venice in under an hour) - all before we even hung up the phone. For $5 per person per days of the Italian leg of our trip, they custom designed our trip, found us our hotels and transportation to each city and then wrapped it up in a nice, neat bow by building a custom app for us to use on our journey.
Booking the Trip
After our phone call, our Noken rep sent us a link to a draft itinerary of the Italy leg of our trip (unfortunately, they do not specialize in Croatia just yet so we were on our own with planning that portion). The itinerary laid out each part of the trip - 2 nights in Rome, 3 in Tuscany and 1 in Venice. For each city, it listed hotels that they recommended. There were several options for each hotel type - if you wanted to stay in hostels they recommended their favorites. If you preferred a five star hotel, you also had options to choose from. And there were options for every star rating in between. For me, this part was super impressive as I always find the booking of hotels to be the most stressful part of vacation planning. There are too many options to choose from for me. From there, we were able to book any tours ahead of time directly through Noken’s service. After we chose our hotel, all we needed to do was enter in our credit card information and Noken booked everything for us - hotels, trains, rental car, etc. All that was left to do was dream about all of the pasta and wine I was about to consume.
Two weeks before take off
Roughly two weeks before our departure, Noken sent us a link to download our custom app. This app had everything we could need. The opening page of the app laid out each day of the trip which you could click into to get more details. There was a “Before You Go” section which laid out everything we would need in regards to passports, packing, culture, etc. By clicking into each day, the itinerary was laid out with where we were staying, restaurant recommendations and suggestions on sightseeing. Each place had directions for ease of getting to. The hotels and transportation all had receipts loaded into the app so we didn’t have to go searching various locations for booking confirmations. If we weren’t super excited about our vacation before receiving the app, we were now!
Vacation is finally here
I can’t say better things about Noken. Any stress that could come with traveling was gone with this app. There was no need to print out confirmation emails for our bookings or train tickets because it was all uploaded to the app. You didn’t need internet in order to use the app so if we decided to not pay for international cellular data, we could still access everything we needed including driving and walking directions. I was extremely impressed with the hotels we ended up choosing, which I probably wouldn’t have found if it weren’t for Noken. Everything was taken care of for us - all we had to do was simply enjoy our time in Italy.
My only small criticism was that there were a few attractions in Florence and Venice that I had been to before and wanted to show my boyfriend, but they weren’t included in the app. I thought that was bizarre since they were big tourist spots, however, Noken knew I had already been to Italy so they probably included more obscure suggestions for sightseeing instead.
Enjoying our time at Salcheto Winery - recommended by Noken!