Would you like to determine your itinerary for your upcoming trip, but you don’t know where to start? If you are new to traveling, it can seem like a daunting task to determine the general itinerary for your trip. It doesn’t have to be difficult, simply follow the steps below and you’re off to a great start to planning your trip.
Steps to Create the Perfect Itinerary
- Determine how many nights in total you will be staying at a hotel/apartment. Remember, you might arrive on the next day after you leave: Leave on a Wednesday, arrive on Thursday. In the example, this is 9 nights.
- Write down the cities that you want to visit. (photo A)
- Look at a map to see how far away the cities are from each other. (photo B)
- Arrange the cities in the order that would make the most sense to travel from one city to the next. You don’t want to spend precious time traveling when you can be experiencing something new.
- Remember, you can fly into one city and out of the next.
- This will be your first edit of cities. Sometimes, the cities are just too far apart to be able to fit them all into this trip (save the cities for the next trip). (photo A)
- Assign a number to each city for the number of nights you will be staying in that city. (photo A)
- Edit your list of cities again to determine what is possible in the number of nights you are staying.
- Write down the days of the week that you will be traveling. Next to each day, write down the city you will visit that day. (photo C)
This is your Perfect Itinerary! Have fun researching the rest of your trip.
Other Things to Consider:
You are traveling to experience things. Embrace being busy…you have time at home to enjoy a lazy morning.
Visit Rome2Rio.com to see what transportation options you have between cities and how long it takes to travel from one city to the next.
We recommend a minimum of two nights in one city. This allows for one full day of exploring the city in between nights. Depending on when you arrive and leave the city, you might also be able to squeeze out a 1/2 day of sights on the day you arrive or before you leave.
Consider taking a day trip to another city. This way you can stay in one hotel (and leave most of your bags there), see a different city and return to the same hotel. We have done this a number of times including staying in an AirBnB hotel in Madrid, and taking a day trip to Toledo (which was a short 35 minute train ride and a world of difference away).
We often leave on a Wednesday and return 10 days later on a Saturday. This allows 9 nights of hotels/apartments (leaving on Wednesday, we usually arrive on Thursday). Flights are often cheaper if you leave on a Wednesday. Having all day Sunday to recuperate is also very nice. Also, this can give the option of staying in 3 different places/cities.
Don’t try to visit too many cities or countries (especially with children). Trains and planes are great, but with a limited amount of time, you can only do so much. Save the other cities/countries for your next trip.
Research the best way to get from the airport to the hotel in your first city. Many times a taxi makes the most sense because you are tired from the long flight. It requires less thinking to show the driver your destination’s address than to try to navigate public transportation.
