This post may contain affiliate links, which means at no additional cost to you I may earn a commission, if you make a purchase. Thank you for using these links to support my blog and enable me to continue to provide you with free content. You picked the destination, and the dates are on the calendar. Now you have to actually plan the trip. If you’re staring at 27 open tabs, saved Instagram Reels you can’t find, restaurant screenshots buried somewhere in your camera roll, and a Pinterest board with 87 places you might want to visit, you need a travel planning checklist. Planning a trip can quickly go from exciting to overwhelming. You want a great vacation with your husband, family, or friends, but you also have church, work, kids, laundry, appointments, kid’s activities, dinner, and normal life happening at the same time. You don’t have hours of uninterrupted time to sit at your computer researching which side of an island has the better beaches. You need a system. After planning more than 300 trips, I’ve developed a step by step process that helps me take all those saved places, recommendations, reservations, and ideas and turn them into an organized trip. I put that entire process into The Intentional Travel Planner, a downloadable travel planning checklist designed to help you know what to research, what to book, what to organize, and what you’re probably forgetting. GET THE INTENTIONAL TRAVEL PLANNER → First, stop trying to plan the entire vacation at once. One of the easiest ways to make trip planning overwhelming is to jump between flights, restaurants, hotels, activities, packing lists, rental cars, Instagram and Google all at the same time. Instead, plan your trip in stages. Once you have chosen where you are going and when you are going, you can work through the rest of the trip one piece at a time. My travel planning checklist isn’t designed to help you decide whether you should go to Greece or Colorado this year. You already picked the destination and have the dates. Now we’re turning that trip idea into an actual plan. Before I start building a day by day itinerary, I create a personalized Google Map. I start pinning anything and everything I’m considering for the trip: At first, the map can look a little crazy with pins everywhere, but then you start visually seeing your trip. Three restaurants you saved are within walking distance of one of the resorts you are considering. The beach you thought would be perfect after your morning tour is actually 45 minutes in the opposite direction. That adorable café you saw on Instagram happens to be two blocks from an activity you already planned. Now you’re building an itinerary based on location, instead of randomly choosing activities from a list. This means less crisscrossing, less time sitting in a car and more time actually enjoying the place you traveled all that way to see. There will ALWAYS be another restaurant, hotel, and “10 Things You Absolutely Cannot Miss in Santorini” video. In today’s world, you can research for hours on end and still not make a dent! At some point, more research stops helping. I like to use Pinterest (for finding other travel blogs), Instagram, TikTok, Google, Trip Advisor, and destination websites to find places that consistently come up. If I research a destination long enough, I usually start seeing the same names repeatedly. That’s my cue to stop. I don’t need to watch another 42 Reels. Add the places of interest to your map and move on. Your goal isn’t to know everything there is to know about your destination. Your goal is to know enough to plan a trip you’ll love. Once your map is filled in, start grouping things together. If you’re spending the morning in one neighborhood, look for lunch nearby. If you’re driving an hour for a particular activity, see what else is in that area. If you have a sunset reservation on one side of the island, don’t plan an afternoon activity that requires racing across the island at 4:30pm. A good travel planning checklist helps you catch those things before you’re actually on vacation. You can be organized without scheduling every single second of your vacation. I’m the first to admit I love a plan. I enjoy seeing things in a destination and enjoying the food and the culture. We’ve visited 19 countries and all 50 US states, so we aren’t the type of people that go to the same destination year after year. This means that I plan knowing in the back of my mind I might not ever step foot in that city/island/country again. I also know how much better our vacations go when intentional rest time is built in. This is even more important when we travel with our three kids. Start building your itinerary with the things that actually require reservations. Things like tours, hard to book restaurants, ferries, timed attractions and anything you would be genuinely disappointed to miss should go onto your itinerary first. Next, fill in time around those activities. Leave room for slow mornings or an afternoon nap on the balcony overlooking the ocean/mountains/city. Leave room to sit beside the water longer than you planned because the weather is perfect, you can hear the waves hitting the shore, and nobody is ready to leave. Leave room to discover the café with the tiny patio, warm lights and the best croissant you’ve had in your life that never showed up in your research. Take care of enough of the logistics ahead of time that you can relax once you’re there. This is where a travel planning checklist really earns its keep. Nobody gets excited about researching luggage storage, until your flight lands at 8:00 a.m. and your hotel room isn’t available until 3:00 p.m. The little logistical details can make a huge difference. You don’t need to do everything in one sitting. Give yourself 20 or 30 minutes and complete one part of the trip. Spend one day researching accommodations, another starting your Google Map, another researching restaurants. Breaking this up into manageable chunks will help not feel overwhelmed. The Intentional Travel Planner is my downloadable travel planning checklist and guide based on the process I use to plan our own trips. It walks you through: There are also clickable resources throughout the planner to make your research easier. You can print the planner and write on it or use the PDF digitally. BUY MY STEP-BY-STEP PLANNING CHECKLIST → You don’t have to become an organized person. That’s the point of having a process. You don’t need a color coded spreadsheet, seven planning apps and a perfectly organized Pinterest account. You need somewhere to start and a way to know what comes next. Follow the checklist, do the next thing, then the next. Eventually the giant overwhelming thing called PLAN VACATION becomes a hotel reservation, a map, a few dinner reservations, booked activities and an itinerary that makes sense. I don’t plan our trips because I want every moment controlled. I plan because when we finally get there, I want to be there. I want to walk out of our hotel knowing where we’re headed instead of spending the first 45 minutes of the morning searching Google. I want to enjoy dinner instead of scrolling through restaurant reviews while everyone asks where we’re eating. I want to relax because we have reservations for that tour that booked up months ago. Do the thinking at home and enjoy the trip when you get there. If you already have your destination and dates and you’re ready to turn them into an actual trip, grab my travel planning checklist and start planning one step at a time. PURCHASE THE INTENTIONAL TRAVEL PLANNER → Some links in this post and planner may be affiliate links. I may earn a small commission when you purchase through them at no additional cost to you.
Feeling Overwhelmed Planning a Trip? Start Here.
My Travel Planning Checklist Starts With a Map
Stop Researching in Circles
Plan Your Days by Location
Leave Room for Rest
Remember the Boring Stuff
“I Don’t Have Time to Plan All of This.”
What Is The Intentional Travel Planner?
What If I’m Just Not an Organized Person?
Plan Now So You Can Relax Later
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