Planning basics
How do you organize an itinerary day by day?
Group by geography before you think about time. Put each day's stops in one part of the city, order them so you move in a line rather than back and forth, and anchor the day to whichever booking has a fixed hour. Then leave one unplanned block per day, which absorbs a long lunch or something you find on the way.
Most bad itineraries are geographically incoherent rather than overfull. Four reasonable stops arranged as a star around your hotel produces two hours of transit; the same four arranged as a line produces twenty minutes. Seeing the stops on a map is usually enough to spot it, which is why mapping the list comes before scheduling it.
Fixed times are the skeleton. A timed museum entry, a dinner reservation, or a train sets where the day bends, and the flexible stops arrange themselves around it. Trying to schedule the flexible things first and fit the fixed ones in afterwards is the harder version of the same problem.
Write the day as blocks rather than clock times: morning, after lunch, evening. Clock times imply a precision you won't hold, and the first slip makes the whole day read as failed even when nothing important was missed.
Step by step
- 1
Map every place first
Get each stop onto a map with an address. Clusters become obvious immediately.
- 2
Assign clusters to days
One area per day. If a place sits alone across town, pair it with the day that ends nearest to it.
- 3
Drop in the fixed times
Reservations and timed tickets go on their day first, and the rest of that day forms around them.
- 4
Order each day as a path
Sequence the stops so you walk in one direction. Check the gap between consecutive stops.
- 5
Leave one block empty
Per day. It's what turns a schedule into a trip.
Do it in Arriv
Last reviewed