In 2023, I’ve booked no less than 10 trips for this calendar year. Some trips include my entire family, and some are just me or parts of my family. That’s a lot of flights, hotel reservations and dates to remember! How do I keep it all straight?
Multiple Calendars
In our laundry room, we have giant dry-erase calendar board like this one. We mark off every vacation, weekend trip, work trip, sleep away camp etc. on this master calendar. Having a giant visual for all of our out-of-town dates really helps.
In addition, I add trips to my iPhone calendar and share it with my family.
Email folder for each trip
This is one of my most helpful tools: As soon as I start to plan a trip, I create a separate email folder for the trip. I move all airline and hotel emails with confirmation numbers to this folder. When I need to reference anything about the particular trip, I just go to the email folder.
Trip to-do list
For the big trips, I write a to-do list so I don’t forget any steps. Some of these to-dos include booking a positioning flight before an international trip, booking a rental car or even buying specific clothing. I’m old-school and like to write my to-do lists in a paper notebook.
Master document
Even though I may have all my reservation numbers in an email folder, I still create a master document for each trip with all our flight and hotel information by day. This is most important on our long international trips when we have multiple destinations. I usually create this on Google Docs and send a pdf to my husband so that both of us have the info. And yes, I print out a page and carry it in my handbag in case I lose Wi-Fi/power to my electronics.
How do you stay organized when you plan your travel?
Love this content. I’m try to improve my planning and organizing side for travel. This is very useful, thanks!
@Helene Glad you found it useful!
The calendar looks pretty good! I do the same thing with the emails. I have award wallet that automatically adds the hotels and flights on there from the emails. Sometimes it does well and add the activities booked too. It helps me to see if I double booked something that I need to cancel.
@Elena Great! Glad that award wallet also helps you stay organized.
I made a master packing list. So I don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel each trip we take. Of course it gets adjusted to our method of travel, but the master list is a solid way to start.
@Meow Great idea!
I do the same thing. It also removes the nagging feeling of “did I forget something important?!”