How To Build The Perfect Itinerary For Every Vacation
One of the most frequent questions that we receive after all of our trips is “How did you guys plan this!?” Planning a trip is almost as enjoyable to us as actually taking the vacation and, at this point, we have it down to an exact formula - a process that’s much easier than you think! We can’t believe it’s taken us this long to put this post together, but we’re finally sharing the full process that goes into all of our trip planning. Try it for yourself and we guarantee you’ll maximize your time on vacation, ensure you’re picking the most convenient accommodations and truly enjoy traveling!
1) Make Your Master List.
Unless you’re traveling for a specific reason (work, a wedding, etc.), prior to most big trips, you likely already have a few places in mind to visit…otherwise, why would you book your tickets in the first place!? Before building our itinerary, we make a complete list of everywhere we would like to visit if we had all the time in the world. When compiling our Master List, we go through a few different steps to help us get started. Here’s everything we go through:
The Landmarks - We’re talking the basics - Eiffel Tower in Paris, Central Park in New York, etc. Sure, some of these might be tourist traps, but we’ve never understood people who turn their nose up at the tourist attractions. There’s a reason these places are famous - they’re pretty incredible!
The Internet - We have a few travel sources that we love when we are planning a trip somewhere new - Lindsay Silberman, Everyday Pursuits and Katie’s Bliss - are a few of our top favorites. Hopefully, we are a great resource for you too, but, if we haven’t been somewhere that you are visiting, check any of these women out! Also, just plain old Google. We try to avoid Trip Advisor, Lonely Planet, etc. for the most part, but just using Google to search can be a great start. As a reminder, our complete list of destinations we’ve traveled to can be found HERE. We have full guides for most of these spots, as well as detailed Instagram highlights. If you use our guides, we love nothing more than to see your tags! We put so much work into these posts and it’s the ultimate reward to see people using and loving them!
The Influencer Tags - If you’re following us on the ‘gram, you’re probably no stranger to following influencers/bloggers, celebs and - most importantly - friends. One of our favorite things is saving, or bookmarking, Instagram posts of places we would like to visit and activities we would like to do. Even if we don’t have a trip currently booked to the destination, one day we might and these bookmarks have become the easiest way to plan when we eventually do book - especially when they come from friends or bloggers that you trust. Some of our favorite finds on trips have come from this simple activity. This is also usually a great way to find places that aren’t as touristy or may be more off the beaten track. To save a post, all you have to do is hit the icon in the bottom right corner of the image. You can easily find all of your saved posts by clicking on the three lines in the top right corner of your profile. It’s one of the easiest way to get trip inspo!
Friends and Family Recs - Pretty self-explanatory, but, we always like to reach out to any close friends or family members who have visited the spot we are going to. We like to ask about any places they loved, spots they’d avoid, what they would change about their trip in hindsight, etc. When it comes to recommendations from friends and family, it’s helpful to take things with a grain of salt as everyone travels differently. For example, if you and your friend typically enjoy very different restaurants when at home, you may not always enjoy their recs for where to go on vacation.
2) Design A Map.
We are obsessed with using the My Maps feature on Google Maps. It is an easy way to visually see where all of the activities, restaurants, etc. on your list are located and to plan each day accordingly. Even if you are just visiting one city, not an entire country, you’ll want to try to keep your exploring in similar neighborhoods, at least by day.
We start off designing our map by entering the name of every single place on our “Master List.” Our Ireland map is below. Once we entered in all of our desired locations, it became pretty clear that our trip would be concentrated in 3 different areas and any of the pins falling outside of these circles might not make sense for this trip.
This also helps us know how long we should be spending in each area. For my Ireland trip, I was able to easily see where the most pins were clustered and where I might need multiple days, whereas other locations only had a handful that could easily be completed in a day.
Once you’ve designed your map, this will also give you a good idea of where you want to book your hotel or Airbnb. If you find a great hotel deal that’s 30 minutes from all of your pins, it will probably make more sense to book a more expensive stay closer to your stops to save time, but also money in transportation costs.
3) Create Your Schedule.
We may be a little archaic, but we use Excel (Google Sheets to those of you in the 21st century) to actually write out our complete schedule by day. We create a column for each day + a row for each part of the day (Morning, Afternoon, Evening). To begin creating your schedule, we suggest starting with the things that you care about most, in case there are limitations with hours, tour availability, etc. For example, when I visited Amsterdam, the Anne Frank House was the number one place that I wanted to be sure to see. Tour times book up SO quickly and, when I looked, a 6PM Tuesday tour was the only slot available for my trip. I booked my tour time and began planning the rest of the trip around it. We suggest working from your “must-sees” to the “nice to haves”
After we build the complete itinerary, we bold + highlight any actions that we need to take such as “Make Reservation”, “Need Transportation” or “Book Hotel.” See below for a screenshot of what part of our final Ireland itinerary looked like.
This doesn’t have to be a strict schedule, or doesn’t mean that you can’t let yourself enjoy the trip, but we have found that having an outline of what we want to do and where we want to go actually prevents us from ending up at a bad restaurant or at a tourist spot during the busiest part of the day.
4) Book Your Accommodations + Activities
Now that you know where your “must sees” are located + your schedule, you can start to book your accommodations + activities. While we are always looking for budget friendly options, we also generally opt not to sacrifice location for price. Any time we’ve booked for cost versus location we’ve ended up regretting it + spending a ton of money on Ubers late at night or even just on public transportation. Plus, we’ve ended up losing out on precious time in our destination. If possible, we also always recommend putting the actual address of the Airbnb or hotel into Google Maps to see if it’s actually as close to downtown, or your desired destination, as it says. We’ve noticed it’s pretty common, especially on Airbnb, for them to say their house is a short 10 minute drive when in actuality it’s only a 10 minute drive in the middle of the night when you’re going 10 over the speed limit.
When it comes to activities, you should have already booked any of your absolute must sees while working on your itinerary, to ensure that you could have that time slot. We also like to purchase tickets online for anything else we plan on seeing. Of course this isn’t an option for every place, but it saves us a lot of time + sometimes the online prices are even cheaper than in person! We also like to make dinner reservations for restaurants that we absolutely want to try. Sometimes you’ll get lucky, like when Kelda walked right into Ferdi in Paris, but a lot of times you will get turned away for popular restaurants if you don’t have a reservation. This also makes sure you avoid any restaurants in the tourist squares that all have pictures of the food on their menus…
Kelda always likes to print all of her flight information, accommodation information, and tickets for anything she has pre-purchased…total Type A Virgo move, but it’s also saved her a few times, like when Dublin’s Customs asked her to provide proof of her return ticket + her phone wouldn’t load anything.
5) Travel!
When you’ve planned a trip well, it takes so much stress out of your actual trip. You don’t have to worry about how to fit in everything you want to see, or arrive + realize you don’t even know what you want to do.
Are you a total planner, or do you prefer to just show up + go with the flow? If you have any of your best tips that we didn’t include, let us know!
