So Hammad and I decided to go to Turkey for our honeymoon! This has been pending since ages now cause of all the other stuff we had to fix before we could finally breathe out and plan a holiday. I’m still happy we didn’t go right after our wedding as I wanted to shake off the wedding blues and let everything calm down before I sat down to plan everything in detail. I wanted to see as much of Turkey as possible!
We were not sure where to go at first so we popped the question on my instagram! The choices were Italy, Turkey or Greece. Italy has been on my bucket list for ageeees and I really wanted to experience it with my best friend but we decided to go for Turkey cause A) halal food options and B) halal food options. Lol. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how we planned our trip and so I thought it was time for a Turkey blogpost! These are short single handy tips on how to plan your trip, how to research about the area you’re visiting, what to expect and what not!
Ask your friends/followers
I’m the most active on instagram and have the most loyal followers of all times so I put up an “ASK” box in my stories, asking for recommendations in the country, attractions, must-see’s, things I should avoid etc, and a lot of girls went out their way to give me an insight of their trip. This helped us narrow down main attractions and mostly what city we wanted to see first. Hammad really wanted to go to Pamukkale first but I insisted that we should see Istanbul and so we booked our trip to Istanbul!
I created a google doc in the same run so I could write down everything you guys were recommending and it was the best tip till date. This way I could write little descriptions about the attraction, opening times, how much the entrance was and any other important detail that you shouldn’t forget! This was very roughly done, so no fancy planning here. I was merely creating a draft out of our itinerary.
Travel Bloggers & highlight
The google document led us to our own research and I found tons of random travel bloggers on instagram which really really helped me a lot in my planning. I would find a new blogger and search for an “istanbul” or “Turkey” highlight icon and from there save all the locations and places I wanted to see as well! This wasn’t just helpful, but a very effective way of planning. Seeing someone experiencing something in real-time is so much better than reading a text about the place, in my opinion. Although, just keep in mind that these bloggers are professional travel bloggers and so they are paid to stay at certain hotels, visit certain restaurants (not all, but 90% of them at least) and so I didn’t put too much thought into their reviews of these places. For the reviews I went to Tripadvisor!
Flight tickets
My best tip would be to not limit yourself for a specific month when flying. We were very flexible and decided that it needed to happen 1) this year and 2) within 6 months. So we used Google Flights to check when the flight tickets were the cheapest and then decided date after that.
My preferred days were the weekdays cause I’m from Scandinavia and everything’s boring and closed here on the weekends, but I later realised that it’s not how things roll in Turkey. We still went with tickets that covered weekdays, however, as it was cheapest for us, but it wouldn’t have made a huge difference anyway as most of the attractions in Turkey are open on weekends as well. One thing we both agreed on were the airline. No low-cost airline as this was our honeymoon trip and we wanted a luxurious/budget kind of thing. By this I don’t mean that we booked first class tickets but we really didn’t want all the mess that comes along with the low-cost airlines. No luggage, delays and ugh just a very bad flight overall. So we decided to go with Turkish Airlines both ways which I think was a really good idea!
Hotels
We were a bit on the same page with the hotel as with our tickets. Luxury but in a budget lol. I would love a clear view of the Ayasophia, a jacuzzi and suite all to ourselves but let’s be realistic now. I have other things planned that I want to spend this money on, which is why we decided to stay decent. We looked up a really good hotel in the Beyoglu area in Istanbul, but since it was a bus away from the main attractions we wanted to see, I convinced Hammad to come closer to the inner city. The hotel we were looking at first was The Elysium Hotel Istanbul which had really good reviews. We also looked at the Levni Hotel, which a follower recommended, but decided to go with <b>The Arcadia Blue</b> where we booked a standard double room. We didn’t want to go with AirBnB for our honeymoon trip.
Getting ready for Turkey
What was next on the list? Clothes, accessories and blogger-friendly pictures! I started looking for decent clothing I could wear in summertime, which I could shoot in as well and it was really easier said than done. A lot of my followers recommended Modanisa, but I realized when looking at the site that it really wasn’t my style. I wanted western look to it but decent. I’m so happy that we had so much time to plan cause I ended up finding dresses here and there in 2-3 weeks. My favorite website was deff Asos! Loooove and recommend it to everyone looking for ANYTHING fashion related. They have all brands from A to Z you could think of and the website and app is so user-friendly! I will go deeper into this and show you all my outfits for the day, but just wanted to put it out there that Asos helped me a lot 🙂
Hope these small steps helped you get some insight in our planning. I’m thinking of making detailed posts about each and every heading so you know where to go from here! See ya soon!
