How to plan a trip without drowning in forty open tabs

• Travel
• Research tips

Published 4 November 2026

You start looking at flights to Lisbon on a Tuesday night. An hour later you have three flight search sites, five hotels, two apartments, a blog post about the best neighbourhoods, the metro map and a restaurant someone recommended on a forum. On Thursday you look again and can no longer remember which hotel had free cancellation, or where you saw that cheaper flight.

It is not a lack of organisation: a trip is lots of decisions that depend on each other, and the browser was not made for that. This guide offers a simple method for researching a trip without losing anything. It works with paper, a spreadsheet or whatever you already use. At the end we explain how we do it with busca.click, in case it helps.

1. Before you open the first tab

Five minutes here save you hours later. Write down in a note:

• Dates: fixed or flexible, and by how much. One day either way can change the price of a flight a lot.
• Total budget, and roughly how it splits between transport, accommodation, food and activities.
• Must-haves: area, free cancellation, checked luggage, a kitchen, accessibility, travelling with children or a pet…
• Who decides. If several of you are going, agree on the above before everyone starts sending links to the group.

That note is your filter: anything that does not meet it is out, without opening more tabs.

2. Research in stages, not all at once

What wears you out is jumping from hotel to flight and from flight to day trip. Each decision shapes the next, so it pays to go in order:

1. Destination and dates, with a rough idea of the cost.
2. Transport. It is usually the biggest constraint (times, stopovers) and its price changes the most.
3. Accommodation, once you know the exact nights and where you arrive.
4. What needs booking ahead: museums with limited entry, tickets, restaurants, car hire.
5. Logistics: travel insurance, documents, getting from the airport, how to pay there.

Do not move to the next stage until you have decided the previous one, or at least narrowed it to two or three options.

3. Tame your tabs

• One window per stage. Flights in one, accommodation in another. In Chrome, named and coloured tab groups help a lot, and you can save them to reopen another day.
• One bookmark folder per trip for what you want to keep (the map, the museum's site, the blog about neighbourhoods).
• Close what you rule out as soon as you rule it out. If it does not meet your note from step 1, it does not deserve a tab.

4. Compare the real price

The big price on the screen is rarely what you end up paying. To compare options you need the total price, and that means writing down a few things about each one. A spreadsheet with one table per stage is enough:

Some common traps:

• Luggage and seats on low-cost airlines: a cheap flight plus a bag can cost more than one that includes it.
• Tourist taxes and cleaning fees at hotels and apartments, which sometimes only appear at the last step.
• "Free cancellation": check until exactly which day and time.
• The same hotel on several sites: also compare with the hotel's own website, which sometimes has a better price or an extra.

5. Prices change: note when you saw them

Flight and hotel prices change with demand, so write down the day you saw each price. If you look again a week later, you will know whether it went up or down. For flights, the price alerts on search sites (Google Flights, Skyscanner, Kayak…) are useful and free; use them.

As for the idea that searching in incognito mode gets you lower prices: there is no solid evidence for it. What does change from day to day is availability, and the price with it.

6. Before you book

• Check the final price at the last step, before paying.
• Make sure the names match your ID or passport exactly.
• Check the country's entry requirements on its official website or your government's travel advice.
• Keep all confirmations in one place, available offline too (a PDF on your phone will do).

7. Do it without any tools

A note with your criteria, one stage at a time, a table per stage with the total price and the date, and closing tabs ruthlessly. You need nothing more to plan a trip well. The rest is convenience.

How we do it with busca.click

The tedious part of the method above is step 4: copying the name, price and link of every option by hand so you can close the tab with peace of mind. busca.click is a Chrome extension that does that for you:

• Create a topic for each part of the trip: "Lisbon · flights", "Lisbon · places to stay", "Lisbon · things to do". Or just one if the trip is simple. You can rename them and move each item to the topic it belongs to.
• Save each option with one click (or a keyboard shortcut) and close the tab. The page stays in your list with its link, its title and the date you saved it.
• Prices and notes. If the page publishes its price in a standard way, as many hotel and shop sites do, busca.click records it by itself. If not (common with flights), you add it with Edit, together with a note: "no breakfast, free cancellation until the 10th".
• Has the price changed? If you save the same page again another day and busca.click can read its price, it tells you whether it went up or down since last time.
• The same hotel on two sites: if they are not grouped automatically, you merge them with one click and see their prices together.
• Search everything you have saved when you cannot remember where something was.
• Truly private. Your travel plans say a lot about you, starting with when you will be away from home. Everything stays in your browser: no account, and nothing is sent to anyone, not even us.

And what it does not do: it does not book anything, it does not alert you to price drops (use the search sites' alerts for that) and, on purpose, it does not save payment, login or basket pages, so the final booking stays out.

busca.click is not on the Chrome Web Store yet. When it is, we will announce it on the home page.