Vacation itinerary template
The most common mistake in a holiday itinerary is planning all of it. A day with four scheduled things is not a holiday, it is a schedule, and the traveller resents the document by Wednesday.
The skill is deciding what actually has to be fixed.
Fix these
- Anything with a time somebody else controls: flights, trains, a booked tour, a restaurant that needs reserving weeks out.
- The first afternoon and the last morning. Arrival and departure days are the ones that go wrong, and they are the ones people plan least.
- Anything that sells out or closes on a specific day. A museum shut on Mondays is worth a line; a beach is not.
Leave these open
Everything else. Offer two or three options per day and let them choose in the morning. An itinerary that reads "Tuesday: the old town, the market if it is open, dinner wherever you end up" is more useful than a timed list, because it survives rain and a lie-in.
The three details that ruin a good day
Opening days, not opening hours. Everyone checks the hours. Almost nobody checks that the place is closed on Mondays until they are standing outside it.
Getting there from where they will actually be. A twenty-minute journey from the city centre is fifty from the hotel. Measure from the hotel.
What is closed for lunch. In a lot of the world, between roughly 13:00 and 16:00, the answer to "shall we go now?" is no.
The limit of any template
A holiday itinerary is written weeks ahead and lived in the moment. The gap between them is filled by whoever the traveller can reach — which, if you are their agency, is you, at whatever hour the question occurs.
Viaquo answers most of those from the trip data itself, so the ones that reach you are the ones that need you.
Related: What actually belongs in a travel itinerary · Day pages and trip recaps