Once you have the perfect idea for your trip, the next step is to do some basic planning. The two things you’ll need to start booking your trip with confidence are 1) a rough itinerary and 2) a travel budget. These two things are related. You may find that your budget puts some limits on your itinerary, or you may decide that you need to increase the budget to make your dream itinerary possible. Either way, it’s wise to consider both these facets of planning before booking your flights. Let’s start with how to make an itinerary.
How to Make a Rough Itinerary
OK, it’s time to think about where exactly you’re going. Are you staying in one big city? Or touring around to many different places? A rough itinerary is an outline for where you’re going on your trip, with just enough detail to allow you to start booking things. This the first step of “how to make an itinerary,” not a final draft of your trip. Later on you’ll come back to it and make a detailed itinerary.
Start With a List
Start by making a list of the places you want to visit and how long you might like to stay there. Focus on the big picture of cities, towns, and major day trips. A list for Japan might start with “Tokyo – 3 days, Kyoto – 2 days, Mt. Fuji – 1 day.” Don’t worry about more details than that yet. A rough itinerary is a very general outline of where you’ll be going, not a schedule.
A few things to consider when making your rough itinerary: big cities usually have lots to see, so give yourself multiple days to explore. Smaller towns can be better for a quick stopover of a day or two. If you’re planning on some place to relax like a beach, make sure to give yourself time to actually relax.
Work Out Your Route
Next, use a map to work out a logical route for all your locations. Google Maps is great for this. Just add in your cities/locations and see how to get between them. Rearrange your locations so you won’t be spending extra time criss-crossing the country! It’s usually easiest to start and end in a city with a big international airport, but sometimes that won’t be possible.
Google Maps will also let you switch between different modes of transportation and compare them. You don’t have to decide yet how you’re getting from place to place, but you’ll need to think about these options soon (ooo foreshadowing).
Edit Your Rough Itinerary
Finally, look at your rough itinerary and see if you need to make any cuts based on how many days you have to travel. Think of your initial itinerary as a wish list. If you have enough days to “buy” everything on your list, that’s perfect! But if you’re like me, you’ll probably need to cut something or reduce the time somewhere. At the end, the number of days on your rough itinerary needs to match how many days you have to travel (sad face). I’ll work through an example below to show you what this might look like.
One bit of travel planning advice: try to avoid one-night stays. I find it’s stressful checking into a hotel and then leaving again the next morning, but a day trip can be really convenient. If you only have one day worth of activities in a place, consider making a it a day trip while staying overnight in another location. You can make a note next to the entry on your itinerary so you know where you’re staying that night. Example: “Mt. Fuji – 1 day – stay in Tokyo.”
Rough Itinerary Example: Southern Germany
To see the rough itinerary process in action, let’s look at a trip to Germany based on a trip I did a few years ago. For this trip, we’re doing 10 days in Germany: Munich, Bavaria, the Rhine Valley, and Berlin. We start with the list of locations and how many days we plan to spend there.
Next we look at the route for that Itinerary, plugging these into Google Maps and seeing if it makes sense.
Since the castle is not super far from Munich, it’s better to do that before heading north to Rothenburg. Let’s switch them. Munich and Berlin are both cities with big airports, so they’ll make great endpoints and can stay. The updated itinerary looks like this:
Now, we have a problem though. We have 13 days of itinerary but only 10 days to do the trip. Time to edit! We could turn Neuschwanstein Castle into a day trip from Munich and make Rothenburg a 1-day stop, but we’d still need to cut another day somewhere. Another possibility is to cut Berlin–it’s a long drive/train ride. Maybe we could fly out of Frankfurt or Cologne in the Rhine Valley area instead. That sounds like a great trip! So, our edited itinerary looks like this:
How to Make a Travel Budget
I have to be honest here: I’m not great about making travel budgets. I usually make a rough estimate based on flight and hotel prices and then assume it will all work out. But when you’re starting out, it can seem like everything travel-related is too expensive. Once you estimate the cost of a trip, hopefully you’ll see that it’s possible (or I guess figure out a cheaper trip heh).
Fortunately, estimating how much a trip will cost is not as difficult as it sounds. Most travel expenses fall into one of four categories: transportation, accommodations, food, and activities. Add these together and boom! you’ll have a budget for your trip. I’ve listed these categories roughly in order of how important they are to the budget.
Transportation
The transportation cost is usually a flight, so start there. Look up flights in the general timeframe you plan on traveling and make a note of the costs. I like to use Google Flights for this. You can look at the price graph view to see the range of flight prices. Don’t use the absolute lowest price–that deal may already be gone. Instead, look at the midrange prices.
If you’re covering a lot of ground on your trip, you’ll also need to factor in other transportation. Trains, rental car, ferry boats–whatever you think will get you to your destinations. There are different ways to do this, but the easiest way is to stick to one mode of transportation as much as possible. For the example Germany trip above, you could plan to use trains to get everywhere. I like the website Rome2Rio, which can give you a quick estimate of how much each journey might cost.
Accommodations
To estimate your budget for accommodations, decide on a price per night and multiply that by the number of nights you’re staying. You can do this for each location on your itinerary, but I think it’s easiest to pick an average number for whatever country/region you’re visiting.
I like to use Booking.com to check prices and get a rough estimate of what things cost. Pull up one of your major cities and see what it costs to stay in a decent place there. How decent is a matter of your personal travel style. Are you planning to stay in luxury hotels or backpacker hostels? Choose an estimated price that works for your style. Usually big city prices are higher than prices in smaller towns, so using this method allows you to err on high side of estimated costs.
Food
Food costs can vary a lot depending on your destination and your travel style. Are you planning to buy food from the grocery store and eat cheap? Are you going out to a fancy dinner most nights? I think the best thing to do here is pick a reasonable number per day and multiply by the number of days. In the United States, I’d estimate somewhere between $50 and $100 as your food cost per day. But (luckily) it can be a lot less depending on where you’re going. The best way to estimate food cost is to consult a guidebook or blog to figure out what typical meals cost in the country you’ll be visiting. Google is your friend here.
Activities
As with food, this cost can vary a lot depending on what you’re doing. If you’re spending the day hiking, that might be free vs. a full-day guided tour that costs hundreds of dollars. And honestly, I’ve done trips where both of those things happened on different days!
The best thing to do here is to decide on a daily budget for how much you’ll spend on activities. Look up a few activities you plan to do and see what they cost. Entrance fees, tour costs, tickets, whatever you think you’ll be doing in a typical day. This is probably going to be less than your food cost per day, in the United States I’d guess around $25-50 per day would cover you. The good thing here is it’s easy to change up your activities if you start going over budget. There are free or cheap activities to do everywhere!
Next Steps
Once you have a rough itinerary and budget for your trip, you’re ready to book flights. It’s OK if your itinerary changes later. In fact, there’s a good chance it will. Trust the planning process and you’ll end up with a trip that’s uniquely yours.
