Many people ask me, "how do you create your travel intineraries?" I tend to answer them with a myriad of tips from researching local travel sites to asking your trusted intrepid friends, but I wanted to provide an answer for my readers. That's why I enlisted the help of my trusted intrepid friend, Emily Keller, to give travel itinerary advice.
Enjoy How to Create a Travel Itinerary!
Although visiting a new destination with absolutely no plan or idea as to what you want to see or do can be invigorating there’s also something to be said for travelling with an itinerary. A travel itinerary outlines important information for your trip, such as hotel stops, places to visit, restaurants to eat at or activities to do. At first, making a travel itinerary can be a daunting task but they’re actually very simple to develop if you know-how.
The key to a successful travel itinerary is research and planning, so be prepared to put in some hard work researching what you want to do, what you want to see, where you want to stay and how you are going to get from A-B. Start by creating a simple word document and then copy and paste anything of interest you find as you research your new destination, don’t panic if you accidentally delete something, you can always find it again in your clipboard history. To help you with the next part of the planning process try to group activities and places together by location. If you’re on a budget, now is also the time to research entry costs and to jot them down next to the activity to enable you to stay on top of how much you are going to be spending.
Once you have a list of your bucket list activities it’s time to work out the best way to fit them all into the timescale of your trip and to plan how you will get from activity A to destination B. If you’ve already grouped your bucket list together by destination then this process will be a lot easier. Remember to give yourself plenty of time for travelling between locations and also account for rest stops or any spontaneous activities you may find to do along the way.
Once you have a bucket list that fits within your travel time and you know how you are going to get from each activity to the next, you can begin to create a calendar outlining what you will do on each day and at roughly what time. Now is the time to schedule in some free time and don’t forget to also account for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Once your calendar is complete it’s time to store it somewhere, this will come down to personal preference and so you may wish to print it as a hard copy or perhaps you want to keep it digital, maybe you’ll even do both. Whichever option you choose, add it to a folder alongside all of your other travel documentation, such as your flight details, your hotel booking references, information regarding any transfers and any important contact details. If you’re going to be using maps to get around, consider also adding copies of these to your itinerary, one tip is to screenshot maps or journeys on your phone so that you can still access them should the Internet be unavailable. The more information within your itinerary the better.
And that’s it, you have a well-planned travel itinerary, happy travels!
**Post contributed by British travel writer, Emily Keller, who is currently planning travel to Asia.**
