About Trippers Terminal

I’m Yasmin, and Trippers Terminal probably exists because I’ve never been very good at booking a trip quickly.

I can happily spend far too long comparing two places that, on paper, seem almost the same, because one has better trains, the other has nicer cafés, one feels easier in the evening, and one just seems like somewhere I’d actually want to wake up for a few mornings in a row. I always end up thinking about the bits in between the obvious sights, like where I’d stay, how I’d get around, whether I’d want to walk there at night, if there’s a market worth planning around, or whether a place that looks beautiful in photos would actually suit the kind of trip I want.

That’s more or less what I write about here.

Travel has also been part of my working life for a long time, just in quite different ways. I’ve worked with tourism boards and destination development, at an airport, I’ve run my own boutique travel agency and planned trips professionally, and I later spent several years working internationally on private yachts, so I’ve seen both the planning side and the practical side of travel from quite a few angles.

I think that’s probably why I care so much about the details that can completely change how a trip feels once you’re there. I’d rather stay in a fairly simple hotel in the right part of town than somewhere beautiful that means taking taxis every evening, and I definitely want to know before I book whether a walk back from dinner is through a lovely old centre or along some dark road with no pavement.

The same goes for destinations in general. Some places are lovely for a few hours but I wouldn’t necessarily want to base myself there, while others don’t immediately look like they have loads going on and then end up being exactly the kind of place I like because they’re easy to settle into and actually nice to spend time in.

So Trippers Terminal has naturally ended up being full of smaller towns, countryside trips, markets, cafés, train journeys, car-free travel and all those slightly annoying decisions that come up once you’ve moved past the inspiration stage and are actually trying to book something.

Some of the places I write about I’ve visited myself and some I haven’t, and I’m very happy to be clear about that. If I’m researching a place rather than writing from personal experience, I try to check the practical information properly, especially things like train routes, bus connections, market days, opening times and anything else that could make someone’s day much more complicated if it turns out to be wrong.

More than anything, I want Trippers Terminal to be useful when you’re sitting with too many tabs open and trying to work out which place actually makes sense for you, rather than just which one looks best in a list.

If you also tend to care about where the station is, what the evenings feel like, whether there’s somewhere good for coffee in the morning and if a market is worth rearranging the trip for, you’ll probably understand exactly what I mean.