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Travel itinerary template: how to write one (free layout)
Someone in the group has done the work. There is a document called "Italy FINAL v3", eleven pages long, with every museum in Florence and a restaurant a cousin swears by. What it does not say is how long the walk is from the station to the flat. On day two, at twenty to ten, five people are standing outside a gallery that needed a timed ticket booked three weeks earlier.
A good travel itinerary is short, and it answers the questions people would otherwise ask you. If several of you are going, the one we recommend is to keep it inside the trip on TravelMatch, free, where everyone can add to it. Wherever it lives, the travel itinerary template below works the same: a header for the whole trip, and one block per day with what is fixed, the morning, the afternoon, the evening, how long it takes to get between places and a plan B. There is a day-by-day example after it.
What a travel itinerary is for
A travel itinerary is the plan of a trip by day: where you are, what you do and how you get there. It is not a list of places you would like to see. That is a wish list, and the difference shows the first morning someone opens it and still does not know what to do.
The test: hand it to someone who was not in the planning. If they have to message you to ask how far the hotel is from the station, or whether the museum needs booking, it is not an itinerary yet.
What to put in a travel itinerary
Two kinds of information. The things that apply to the whole trip go once, at the top: the route and nights in each place, the dates, how you get there and back, where you are sleeping, what has to be booked in advance, a rough budget per day and where the booking references are.
Then each day gets the same block. One fixed thing per half day at most, meaning whatever has a time or a ticket. The rest are suggestions, because a plan timed to the half hour breaks at the first delay and leaves whoever is holding it feeling they have failed. The line almost nobody writes, and the one that helps most, is how long it takes to get between stops. On a map everything looks close. Then it is forty minutes on a bus and a climb.
The travel itinerary template
Copy these fields into whatever you use; the format matters less than filling in the boring ones.
| Field | What to write |
|---|---|
| Day, date, where you sleep | "Day 2, Thursday 14 May, same flat" |
| Fixed | Anything with a time or a ticket. One per half day, maximum |
| Morning | Two or three stops, in the order that makes sense on foot |
| Lunch | The area, not a single restaurant you cannot change |
| Afternoon | Including a rest if the morning was long |
| Evening and dinner | Where you end up, so nobody has to cross the city at 11pm |
| Getting around | From where to where, how, and how long |
| Book ahead | What sells out, and by when |
| Plan B | What you do if it rains or the group is tired |
| Skip | What is not worth it, for whoever uses the plan next |
For a travel itinerary with budget, add a cost column with a range per day. In a spreadsheet each field is a column and each day a row; in a document each day is a heading with the fields underneath.
A travel itinerary example, day by day
Three days in Granada in spring, using the template.
Day 1. Arrive and stay in the centre: the Cathedral and the Royal Chapel are next to each other. Sunset at the Mirador de San Nicolás in the Albaicín, early because it fills up. Nothing fixed, on purpose: arrival days run late.
Day 2. The day the trip is built around.
- Fixed: Nasrid Palaces at 10:00. The ticket has a time slot and you can only go in during it, so it is the one thing that does not move.
- Morning: up to the Alhambra on the C30 minibus from Plaza Isabel la Católica, or on foot up the Cuesta de Gomérez, about 25 minutes uphill. The Alcazaba before your slot, the Generalife after. Allow three to four hours for the whole site.
- Afternoon: lunch in the centre, a rest, then up the Carrera del Darro into the Albaicín.
- Book ahead: the Alhambra ticket, on the official website, several weeks ahead in spring and autumn. Without it this day does not exist.
- Plan B: if it rains, swap the Albaicín walk for the Cathedral and Royal Chapel if you skipped them on day 1.
- Skip: trying to fit the Cathedral in on the same day. After the Alhambra there is no energy left to see it properly.
Day 3. A slow morning in Sacromonte, above the Albaicín, and an afternoon departure. Write when you need to leave for the station, not just the departure time.
Notice that day 2 has one fixed time, a handful of stops and a line of what to skip. That is why someone else could follow it.
Travel itinerary in Word, Excel or Google Sheets?
Word or Google Docs suit you if you write the days in sentences and want to print it. Excel or Google Sheets suit you if you like times and costs in columns, as a travel itinerary spreadsheet. The template works in all of them. What none gives you is the map and the distances, and once more than two people are involved, a document has another problem: it belongs to whoever made it.
The mistakes that break an itinerary
Fourteen stops a day. It looks impressive and nobody does it. Four stops and an unhurried lunch is the plan people actually follow.
No travel times. The most common reason a copied plan falls apart.
Booking deadlines buried in the text. Put them in the header, with a date.
Writing it for one person when four are going. If one of you wants to rest and another wants eight museums, a shared itinerary only makes the argument more organised. Talk about pace first; how to choose travel companions has the questions worth asking before anyone books.
How to share a travel itinerary with a group
A document shared between five is usually opened only by its author by day three, while the changes stay in the group chat. That is why we recommend keeping it inside the trip on TravelMatch. You create the trip and invite your people with a link. The itinerary is organised by day and anyone in the group can add and comment on stops, so it does not depend on one person keeping it up to date. You do not have to start from blank: there are ready-written itineraries for more than 190 destinations, in 3, 5 and 8-day versions, and you can build from one using the fields above. The polls, the shared costs and the group chat sit in the same trip. It is free. How it compares with the alternatives for the rest of the planning is in group trip planner.
If you would rather keep a document, Google Docs and Google Sheets let you share a file as viewer, commenter or editor, which is enough for a small group that reads it. Wanderlog, according to its UK App Store listing, lets you invite tripmates by email or link to edit the plan together and shows stops on a map with times and distances. TripIt builds an itinerary from the booking confirmations you forward to it, useful once everything is booked.
For a rail trip where every day is a different city, see Interrail as a group; if the plan stalls because nobody agrees, how to travel with friends and stay friends has the method.
When the itinerary is ready and the group is not
Sometimes the plan is perfect and nobody can do the dates. An itinerary does not fix that. On TravelMatch you can open the trip so other people can ask to join, and you approve each request after seeing their profile, their reviews, which only people who travelled with them can write, and how well you match. I have no one to travel with goes through the other options.
A good itinerary is not the one with the most places in it. It is the one someone else can pick up and follow.
→ Create your trip and its itinerary on TravelMatch · Free.
Reviewed in October 2026. Google Docs sharing roles from Google's help page, Wanderlog and TripIt from their UK App Store listings, and Alhambra access from local transport guides, all checked on 7 October 2026. Check the official Alhambra website before you book.