We all know that planning a trip is very important to ensure one does not face any difficulties or hassles. We may also know it involves various preparation tasks like flight and accommodation bookings, deciding destination and attractions, packing, identify activities to do, keeping all travel documents ready, etc,.

Do you think just the above things are sufficient to cover all the places, activities or sightseeing that you intend to do within your planned vacation days? Do they alone assure you an efficient travel schedule and save you time to explore places?

The answer is “No”. They alone do not guarantee that you cover all the things you plan to do during your trip. One should prepare an itinerary or a kind of schedule for their activities and sightseeing before they start their trip so that they know where to start and where to stop, when to be busy and when to take breaks, what to cover and what not, what is necessary, important and feasible. More the documents, more the chances that you will miss or misplace something and keeping them in one place is always helpful and saves time.

 

Travel Itinerary

Travel Itinerary is an organized, detailed and efficient schedule of travel activities or sightseeing. It may include details like travel route, date of visit, destination/places to go around, sequence in which places are visited, various stops, specific times to visit, address and other important details of the destination. One can also include any additional details such as flight/hotel bookings, etc., that are important.

 

Benefits of Travel Itinerary

Though I have mentioned it above, one may still have questions in mind as to what are the benefits of an itinerary when all details that we need is available with us.

Below are some benefits of travel itinerary that I can think of from my own experience:

• Information On The Go

All the information that one needs are documented at one place and can be referenced anytime during the travel. This can include any information like travel or stay booking confirmations, stay address, flight details, contact numbers, visit hours, route, and so on. It is always good idea to carry a hard copy (print-out) of the itinerary as there is no guarantee that one will have internet or data plan working at all the places and even sometimes storing it on a battery operated electronic device will not guarantee access if battery dies.

 

• Time Management and Utilization

Itinerary helps in managing your vacation time and how you utilize most of it for exploring places, activities and sightseeing of your interest. If you have an itinerary, you do not tend to waste time around one place, give less time to the other or even miss a few. It will help to track the time allocated. You will also ensure to prioritize the activities or sightseeing based on the time permit when preparing itinerary. What you need during your trip is to follow the itinerary which you have prepared based on your interest, available time and convenience.

 

• Cost Estimation

If itinerary is in place, one will get a rough idea of daily travel expenses especially around fuel and transportation, food, admission/parking and other fees, etc. In other words, it adds to trip cost and hence helps to estimate the overall trip expense.

 

• Ease and Comfort

Itinerary helps one to travel between multiple attractions/destinations easily because all important travel information like the routes, nearby must-visit attractions, visit time schedules, etc., are documented at one place. You do not have to sit and organize things during your trip. In addition, it will also ensure you keep sufficient buffer time for breaks and rest at night times. One can be as flexible as they can per ones convenience and comfort.

 

Tool or Application for Preparing Itinerary

One can use Microsoft Office applications usually installed on laptops/PCs or other trip planner applications like TripIt, Google Trips, etc., available online to prepare the travel itinerary.

We usually use Microsoft Excel to prepare our itineraries each time we plan a trip. We have never used any templates online or any other ready to use application for this purpose. Microsoft Excel is an easy tool where information can be gathered in tabular form and formatted, customized as per your needs and can be documented in a way that is easy to understand.

One can start preparing itinerary using Microsoft Excel application for one or two-day picnics/small trips and then gradually move with preparing itinerary for longer one.

 

Preparing Travel Itinerary (How-To)

Though it sounds like a tedious or complicated task, it is not really so. It may even sound boring if one ignores the benefits or importance of it. Preparing an itinerary is simpler if you have all the information handy. What is time-consuming is information research and gathering. One will only require basic information about their travel and a map to start preparing the itinerary.

Highlighted below are some steps that I follow for preparing a travel itinerary. I always use MS excel for this purpose. Also will be taking an example of our road trip for demonstration purpose with a hope to help you understand the preparation.

 

#1) Using MS Excel

Open MS Excel and create 3 tabs namely “Itinerary”, “Booking Information” and “Attraction Information”. You can have any number of tabs as long as you use them to keep useful information and do not forget to take a hard copy of it. I usually categorize them under below.

• “Itinerary” tab will be used to organize the activities/sightseeing based on various factors which is discussed later in the section.
• “Booking Information” tab will be used to document all booking information like flights, hotels, etc.
• “Attraction Information” tab will be used to document information about attractions planned for visit for each day.

 

#2) Gather Travel Booking Information

Gather all the emails and documents to consolidate the below information pertaining to your travel

• Flight name, contact and booking confirmation
• Flight timings (departure and arrival)
• Accommodation booking confirmations
• Address and contact numbers of each booked hotel (from booking sites or confirmation mails)
• Contact number of booking websites/agents used for various bookings
• Rental car booking confirmation
• Rental vehicle pick-up/drop address and contact numbers
• Travel/Auto Insurance policy numbers and contact numbers

Example:

Below is the information we captured in the Booking Information tab for our road trip to CO-SD-WY-UT. One can include all kind of additional information that is helpful.

 

#3) Research Information about Destination/Places

In addition to travel booking information, one should also research for information about various places or attractions that has been finalized for sightseeing/activities during their visit. Information below may be useful

• All nearby must-visit attractions planned for visit at the destination (this may include attractions within a city or sightseeing/activities/overlooks within a state or national park).
• Their address and contact numbers
• Hours of operation
• Time required to explore the place
• If visiting national parks, keep the map (usually PDF files) of the park handy

Example:

During our road trip to CO-SD-WY-UT, below was some of the information that was captured. Note that it shows information of attractions for few days only as an example.

 

#4) Use Map

Now open Google Map in a browser. It is basically used to decide on an efficient travel route and determine approximate distance between each attractions.

 

#5) Route and Schedule

Add address of all the planned attractions in destination field one by one in the left panel and you can see the route displayed on the other panel. Try to arrange them in sequence as much as possible to avoid redundancy. On the left side panel, you will find driving duration between destinations. It can be used to estimate the travel and visit times.

A tip here is to prepare the itinerary for one day at a time and then this can be consolidated later to form a complete itinerary for your trip.

Your one-way flight and rental car pick-up always fall in the Day#1 plan unless you decide to pick up you rental car another day and use local transport the first day. Return flight and rental car drop-off fall under last day plan. So you can easily keep buffer for these before you start allocating attractions for these days.

Hotel stay may or may not follow immediately on Day#1’s itinerary depending on the time of flight arrival and hotel check-in times.

 

Example#1:

Here I will consider Day#1 of our CO-SD-WY-UT road trip. Our plan was to cover only a couple of attractions around Denver, Colorado as we had flight from Tampa to Denver and also had to pick up rental car from Avis. The 2 attractions finalized were Pikes Peak Summit and Garden of the Gods, Colorado. So the below sequence of event or input was used:

1. Denver International Airport
2. Avis Car Rental Near Denver International Airport
3. Pikes Peak, Colorado
4. Garden of Gods, Colorado
5. Vintage Hotel, Winter Park, CO

I used google map to determine whether the route is efficient. The duration between stops was noted down.

Below snap shows the travel route for the Day#1

Next 2 snaps shows the duration and distance between 2 attractions.

This information from google map with others gathered previously were used to prepare the below itinerary for Day#1. My itinerary had details like visit date, visit day, start by time (from source attraction/destination), driving duration to next destination (as it was road trip), reach by time (to next attraction/destination), Attraction/Activity Name, Time to explore at destination and comments column to capture any additional information. You can customize this according to your needs.

 

Example#2

Another example of how to plan visits to a state or national park with various stops is below. Our Day#2 in CO-SD-WY-UT road trip was visit to Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. This is a big park spread across thousands of acres and require more than a day if people plan to hike some trails. We planned to drive through the park which would atleast require a day to cover various overlooks and hence left this as the only attraction for the day. Below is the itinerary that I used.

 

Finally the itinerary is ready. It can be amended as and when you feel more information needs to be included and until prior to your travel. Before you start the trip, do not forget to take a hard copy of the same.

Once you have concluded your itinerary, you can reuse it later for future trips as I do it using the above template.

Hope this post is of help to you!