Each time you are planning to go somewhere in your free time, preparing the travel itinerary can be complicated and even daunting. It mostly happens because your trip usually involves a lot of details that need to be put in order and supervised. For example, a travel itinerary usually contains things like confirmation emails from the airline that you’ve chosen, hotel and restaurant reservations, or information on car rentals.
Apart from this, scheduling your visits to the tourist attractions in the area and your daily activities can also become a burden. Luckily, we have plenty of tools able to make planning your travel itinerary a lot simpler. The most straightforward and most practical example is a printable calendar.
It will surely help you organize your trip, will save you a lot of time and effort, and most importantly, it may even make your entire vacation a lot more relaxing and beautiful. Imagine transferring all the trip details from your head on paper and always seeing them. Today, we will show you how to simplify your travel itinerary with the help of a simple printable calendar.
Get the Printed Calendar that Best Suits Your Needs
Before diving into details, you should first make sure that you have a printable calendar at hand.
If not, the website CalendarTable.com provides you with some of the most useful and well organized such calendars, made specifically to help you in your travels. Make sure you also check their database on monthly events, holidays, and celebrations to mark some specific dates on your calendar.
You will need those dates to better plan your trip or avoid some crowded moments of the year (for example July 4 festivity tends to blow traffic out of proportion and keep all hotels or venues booked).
So, after you print the calendar that works best for you, start organizing your travel using it to its maximum potential.
1. Use the Printed Calendar to Organize the Main Steps of the Trip
A printable calendar is mandatory for scheduling your trip and all the activities that you are going to do.
• Use the calendar to mark departure and arrival dates and add notes about hotel names, transportation companies, car rental firms, times and even addresses, to make your itinerary clear and well-planned;
• Mark all of your trip days in your calendar and look for details. For example, circle any legal holidays when specific attractions might not be available for the public, holiday weekends, or special days with events you want to attend;
• The next step would be to find tours, shows, beautiful places for sightseeing and anything else that might keep you entertained throughout your trip. Add all of those itinerary details to your calendar;
• The calendar will also allow you to plan your journey while avoiding some incredibly crowded periods at a particular destination; for instance, plan a trip to Venice by scheduling to stay there during mid-week dates for at least three days.
2. Use the Printed Calendar to Split Your Itinerary
Splitting your itinerary into a few separate sections might be very helpful if you’re trying to be as organized as possible.
• In your calendar, you should mark certain days of your trip using different colors. For example, use the color red for sightseeing and the color blue for tours to various objectives. This way you will always know what you need to do and where you need to be next.
• Your calendar is once again your best friend here because you can also write down what exactly are you going to see and where you need to go on each separate day.
Calendars, as good time-management tools as they are, also make advantageous priority-management devices. By using color codes and short notes, you will be able to know what you must do and see, and what things you can skip making room for more spontaneous entertainment choices.
Having everything scheduled on your calendar is indeed beneficial and offers you that inner peace that you need to enjoy your trip. However, this doesn’t mean that if something breathtaking happens or an opportunity arrives, you should never change your plan. A well-structured itinerary doesn’t have to restrict you in any way, but to keep you on track with everything.
3. Use the Calendar as an Everyday Reminder
You may have planned your days, but spontaneity and unforeseen opportunities appear at every corner. In other words, just as you keep a map in your backpack, you can also carry your annotated calendar. Let us face it when you are in a new location and your mind thirsts for discovery and new experiences; you may lose track of time or schedules.
• Use the calendar throughout the day to remember what things you wanted to see and do that day;
• Use the calendar every night in your hotel room to cross the things you did/saw one day and get ready for the things the calendar says you will do the next one;
• Use the calendar to make travel adjustments and modifications; you may have scheduled a museum visit for tomorrow, but you are exhausted from the guided tour you took today. Use the calendar to reschedule the museum or switch activities.
When you use the calendar as a personal agenda, you have a clear sight of time and date, and you can best prepare for what is in front of you. Have you planned a whole day by the beach tomorrow? Take advantage of your free time this evening and set up your beach bag, snacks, water, and book to read.
Knowing what you have to do, when, with who, and for how long allows you to enjoy both the freedom of a vacation and the clear-headedness brought on by scheduling. Trips get more relaxed and more streamlined with printed calendars, as you will have time to organize things and get ready for them.
4. Use the Calendar to Plan Your Budget as Well
We all take money with us when we go on trips, but often we need to exchange currency, use our credit or debit cards, borrow from friends, or skip sightseeing only because we splurged yesterday and forgot to get extra money from the ATM. If you are short on cash and need to find a bank in a foreign country, this will mess up with your schedule and your itinerary quite severely.
When you use a printed calendar, you can plan your budget in general lines, so you can prepare for the days to come and avoid money issues.
• If your calendar says you will spend the next day on the private hotel beach, you will probably need some money, but nothing out of the ordinary. However, if you plan to spend the next day exploring a city and visiting some landmarks, you will need money for entrance fees, snacks, water, transportation, lunch, souvenirs, extra taxes, tickets, and so on.
• The printed calendar helps you manage your money best: you can write down how much money you spent on a particular day to know what to expect on another day of your trip in the same country with similar activities, for instance.
Conclusion
It seems that if you are careful to plan and use a helpful tool, such as a printable calendar, organizing your travel itinerary can become a pleasurable activity. With only a few things to take into account when doing so, scheduling what you are going to do every day of your trip and what you’re going to visit will no longer be such a burden. Also, besides time management, you will get easy money management, leaving room for the welcomed unexpected, spontaneity, and splurging as well.
Remember, sticking to your plan is beneficial and saves you time, effort and stress. Without becoming obsesses with the schedule, use the calendar as a guideline and as a reliable travel companion.
We are happy to present this collaborative post to offer valuable information to our readers.
