More Planning Tips
You can avoid stressful last-minute guesswork at your destination by thinking ahead and tracking important pieces of information you’ll be able to access from your phone on the go. Know exactly what you want to see, do, and eat while leaving plenty of open spaces for changing your mind if you want. Then you get to just sit back and enjoy your adventure! Share your itinerary with a trusted person back home in case something goes wrong, you’ll have a much easier time with all that information easily accessible if you need it. With that in mind, the best place to keep an itinerary log is some place digital you can access from your phone and easily send to your friend. I’ve tracked itineraries on: All 3 of those free solutions allow you to share a view or document with your travel companions and could be accessed from your phone at any time. Then as you make arrangements, continue to add the information to your travel hub. Then as a precaution against possibly needing to make a claim on lost luggage after your trip, you’ll also want to document: If we’re going to Disney, our itinerary is often planned down to the hour with a complicated arrangement of ride reservations, dining plans, and park entry information. If we’re going on a relaxing beach trip, the only thing on any given day might be a dinner reservation. For a complex vacation like our family spring break trip to London, an itinerary becomes seriously important. I actually switched gears halfway through planning our London trip, be sure to see my suggested method notes below. No matter what kind of trip you’re taking, add a space on your itinerary for every day of the trip. Even if you have to leave it blank for now, you’ll have a place to add your ideas later. I started by having our pre-trip family “One Thing” meeting. Once I had a better idea of what was most important to my husband and kids to see, I started filling in the itinerary with those items first. Once all the big-deal can’t-miss items were on the schedule, I had a better idea of what kind of open free spaces we had to work with. I found it most helpful to look at each day, see what the one big activity was and where it was, and then make a simple list of options that were nearby as our secondary list. For Example: Day 2: Breakfast at Sky Garden at 8 am (My Daughter’s Request)Nearby Things to See:
St. Paul’s Cathedral Leadenhall Market Monument to the Great Fire of London London Bridge
Churchill War Room Reservation at 2 pm (My Husband’s “One Thing”)Nearby Things to See:
Westminster Abbey Big Ben Parliament St. James Park
Then when we were actually on our vacation, I didn’t have to wonder what we were close to. We arranged to see the most important thing but then had the option to fill the open spaces with the other interesting things we wanted to see. We could also look at that secondary list and decide we were too tired, or it was raining, or we just weren’t interested in the items. But at that moment we have to know that we may not make it back to see those things and consciously choose to let them go this time. For our family, this was the most flexible approach to a complicated trip. You can see the list of places to book advanced tickets in London here. For each of those kinds of activities, be sure to keep your digital tickets on your phone, print out copies to bring just in case, and add all the confirmation numbers to your itinerary. Even if you just plan one or two meals somewhere in advance, be sure to add them to your itinerary: We stayed overnight for our day trip to Paris from London, so I had to include the second hotel and transportation information. However, even if it had just been a one day back-and-forth, I would have included our Eurostar train ticket information, etc.
