For many, travel doesn’t begin until you’ve landed at your new destination. For us, travel is an experience that begins much earlier, from the sofa at home, when you start dreaming about your holiday and researching your potential travel itinerary. However, this pre-travel phase can be frustrating for many people: “Where do I start? How do I find the authentic places away from the tourist hotspots? Where are the best sights? I don’t want to forget anything! At Passporter we solve all these problems, so that organising your trip becomes your favourite part.
On Passporter there are hundreds of thousands of travellers who are planning travel itineraries. Here we explain step by step how you can make a super easy and useful trip planner. Using the Passporter app is free of charge and you can plan travel itineraries inspired by the experience of other travellers or share your own after your trip so that more travellers can travel better through your experiences. Follow these steps and create your first itinerary in less than 5 minutes.Â
Welcome, traveller!
How to organise your travel itinerary in a conventional way?
1. Research the destination
Unless you are travelling to the most remote place on earth, there is a wealth of useful information on the internet about all destinations to help you organise your travel itinerary. To get the best results, you can type into the search engine phrases such as “what to see in…”, “what to do in…” and “what to do in (place) in (number of days you will be travelling) days”.
These searches will take you directly to specialised travel blogs and websites and, in many cases, to the official tourism website of the selected destination. In these blogs you will find a lot of information from travellers who know the place first hand and will tell you about their favourite places and even, sometimes, their food recommendations. Google itself even offers you a list of outstanding places with ratings and user reviews.
And, of course, if you’re more analogue than digital, you can always get your hands on a good physical travel guide. Just make sure it’s the most recent version you can find. Sometimes paper editions of guidebooks can be a few years old and recommend places that have changed or no longer exist.
2. Accommodation, shops, restaurants…
Now that you know better the destination you are going to travel to, it is time to locate all the places you are going to include in your itinerary. Without a doubt, the most important place is your accommodation because it will be the point around which you will organise the itinerary of your trip. First, research the best neighbourhoods to stay in and, depending on your interests and budget, choose the accommodation that best suits you.
If you are a real foody and you like to try the gastronomy of the places you visit, the best thing to do is to look for places to eat first. We often get carried away and forget that not all countries have the same eating hours as we do, and by the time we realise it, the kitchens of most places are closed or all the tables are booked. So if you are particularly interested in enjoying the food and care about where you eat, look and book well in advance.
This way, with your accommodation, restaurants and other places you want to visit, it will be easier to create a more complete and orderly itinerary.
3. Use a map
Whether digital or on paper, if you want to create your travel itinerary you will need a map where you can mark all the places you want to go. It is best to organise your itinerary by days and choose nearby areas so that you don’t waste too much time on transfers and can make the most of your holiday time. Once you know which areas you are going to visit each day, mark all the places you are interested in visiting and create routes around them. If during your trip you see new places that you want to visit, don’t worry too much; the magic of travel also lies in improvisation.
4. Budget
Sadly, organising a trip is not just about thinking about how many wonderful places you are going to see. Responsible travellers need to know their budget and plan around it. Not all destinations are made for all budgets, but there are some tricks that will help you to enjoy your trip, even if it’s a low-cost one:
- Research the most expensive time to travel to your destination and avoid it!
- Book early. The cheapest accommodation are the ones that sells out first, especially if you’re travelling in high season.
- Use flight and accommodation comparison sites to find the best deals.
- For food, stay away from touristy restaurants that tend to inflate prices. Often the most authentic is also the cheapest.
- Use public transport instead of taxis.
- If the weather is good: picnic! Shopping in supermarkets will be cheaper than going to restaurants every day.
- Exchange currency in advance and avoid doing so at airports.
- Buy souvenirs in local shops; at the airport they can triple the price.
- There are websites that tell you what the budget is for your trip according to the destination, days, type of accommodation…
Travel Tip: To organize your trip we recommend using Passporter totally free. You can be inspired by the experiences of other travelers, choose the places that interest you most, create the travel route with a geolocated map, upload all important documents such as reservations and invite your friends so that everyone can participate in the organization of the trip.
Switch to the Passporter trip planner and enjoy creating your travel itinerary
As you can see, organising a trip can be a slow and tedious process in which you can end up immersed in the depths of the internet without finding the information that best suits you and your trip. That’s why we present Passporter, an easy and functional tool that helps you organise your travel itinerary without spending hours researching. Read on and find out how.
1. Register and Log in
To use Passporter you must create an account and remember that there is no cost. You can do it manually with your email or password and create a username or use one of your networks to make it even easier and faster.
To create the itinerary you can do it either from the app or from the web. That is, you can register and start creating your itinerary from our website passporterapp.com without having to download the app. But if you prefer to do it directly on the Passporter app it is available at:
- App Store if your device is iOS
- Google Play if your device is Android
- App Gallery if your device is Huawei
2. How do I use the Passporter trip planner?
Once you have your account you can create your itinerary from scratch by selecting the places you want to visit. Or you can create a copy of a community traveller’s itinerary and customise it to your liking. This way you can get inspired by other travellers.
In short, when it comes to planning you’ll be able to:
- View locations on a map and rearrange them.
- Get inspiration from other travellers’ free itineraries with their photos and location of the place.
- And best of all, save all the information about the places you browse in one place.
That’s great, isn’t it? So let’s take a look at it, step-by-step.
a. Search for destinations around the world
As mentioned before, once you have registered you can search for any destination you like and find thousands of places shared by the travel community. In Passporter you will find categories such as:
- Of course, the most popular
- The most exclusive, such as rooftops
- The most hidden
- The best neighbourhoods, depending on the destination.
b. Assign a name to your travel itinerary
First name your trip whatever you like, for example, “my trip to Italy”. Then, decide whether you want it to be private for you or your friends, or public for the whole community. Remember that we are a content sharing community. You can follow more travellers and vice versa, so we recommend sharing your itineraries so that more people can discover those places you liked so much on your trip.
c. Add the selected locations to your travel itinerary
There are several ways to add places to your travel itinerary. First, by searching directly in our community. Another way is by creating the place directly and adding the address to your route map correctly. Lastly, by using the Passporter Chrome extension but we will explain this later. This way you will have a lot of variety and as you see amazing places in each destination and decide on the ones that inspire you the most and where you want to go, save as many as you like in your planned travel itinerary. As many as you like.
d. Use Notes to organise your travel itinerary
Notes is a very useful feature of our tool. Upload important files here such as travel tickets, hotel bookings, organise your travel itinerary by day, save internet links and keep everything in one place: your phone.
Add your bookings to your travel itinerary
No more lost bookings or lost locators in your email inbox or jotted down in notes on your mobile, Passporter allows you to enter the location of your accommodation (Booking, Airbnb, Hostels) as a reference point in the travel itinerary you are planning. This way you can always know both the location and the value data. For example the locator of:
- Hotel
- Flight
- Car rental
- Or whatever you need.
Organise your travel itinerary by days
If you like to organise your own route, with Passporter you can edit the order of the places to organise them as you like:
- According to the number of days you will be travelling
- The areas you decide to move around
- The specific location of your accommodation
This is an example of how one of our users organised her itinerary with Passporter. On Passporter you can find many travellers’ itineraries to inspire you to organise your own.
Save links to web pages in your itinerary
You may have read a post by your favourite blogger and want to take all their tips with you. By adding your links to the blogs in your notes, they will appear on your trip planner so you can access the article whenever you want during your trip
- Save or import links to blogs that inspire you to travel and, share them with the rest of the community.
This way, you can have everything you need in your planned travel itinerary, and easily access the links to the blogs or websites that matter. Finally, you can save everything you read on the internet in an organised and useful way to use it on your trip!
e. Use the planned travel itinerary at destination
When you’re at your destination, your travel itinerary will be your best companion. Use the map you’ve organised to get from place to place in the best way.
3. How do I add images from an article I’m reading online to my travel itinerary?
If you’ve found it easy and useful to use the tool so far, here’s another option on how to search for places and images to add much more easily and quickly to your trip planner. At Passporter we have developed a Chrome extension with which you can perform all the above steps by adding content not only from our community but also from the different sites you browse on the internet.
What is the Passporter Chrome extension?
The Passporter Chrome extension is similar to the Pinterest Chrome extension. With it, you can save your favourite and most inspiring pictures from anywhere on the internet, such as your favourite travel blog. Save those images directly to your itinerary.
To use the extension is very easy, install the Chrome extension in your browser so that it appears active in your bookmarks bar. Once you have it installed, when you browse the internet, you can do the following:
- Above the photos you will see a save button. Just like on Pinterest.
- When you hit save, you can choose in which itinerary you want the photo to be saved with the location. You can also add relevant information about the place such as whether the entrance is free or not and the respective opening hours.
4. How do I share my travel itinerary with my friends?
You can make your planned travel itinerary public to the community, or private. If you want to keep it private, you can also share it only with friends of your choice, so that together you can carry your planned itinerary on your mobile and everyone can participate.
Important: You will have to be registered on Passporter and, if you are not, you can do it in 20 seconds. It really is very easy.
5. Share your own travel experience with the Passporter community
Once your trip is over, you can upload your experience to the app. Share your own photos, videos, and recommendations. So when a friend asks you what to do at your destination, you can share your experience with them.
Complete your traveller profile
By signing up to the Passporter app you are creating your profile to start inspiring and planning. And by sharing your own experiences of destinations, you are completing your traveller profile.
Travellers can follow your profile and see the planned travel itineraries you have made public and your own experiences with your travel itineraries.
Join Passporter, the ultimate trip planner. Get inspired, plan travel itineraries and use them at your destination, and share your own experiences when you return.
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