Recently on the Italy thread there has been an interesting discussion about how our members use spreadsheets as a travel planning tool and/or travel guide.
If is clear from the responses on that thread that there are many versions of trip planning worksheets – some simple, some complicated. We thought it would be interesting to see what some of them look like, and perhaps use them to create a resource on our main Slow Travel pages that could be shared with other travelers.
Tell us how you use spreadsheets to plan. What information do you include? How do you organize it. How do you use it?
Then, click on the “add attachment” link at the bottom of the post text box, and share a SAMPLE page or two with us. A couple of suggestions:
a. remember this attachment may be seen by a very broad audience – so you may want to remove critical personal data before posting (personal phone #s, names, etc)
b. tell us what program you used to create it – Excel, Word, etc.
c. If you create multi-page workbooks, let us know how to access all the sample pages.
TourMama
Posts: 3919 | Location: Berkeley, CA | Registered: 22 March 2005
Hi. Here is my Italy trip spreadsheet from last October. I find this is a great way to leave most of my guide books at home and to have restaurant recs right in front of me by neighborhoods, hours and days closed, voucher and confirmation nos. and walking or driving instructions easily available. I planned this trip for 10 months so had so much information and five file folders hanging in my drawer at home. This condensed it all and we were also able to leave the restaurant recommendations at each apartment with our impressions so the next few people renting there could use them. Hope this helps someone. BJinNM
Don't Office documents have the potential to carry viruses?
Microsoft Office documents can carry viruses in macros (as far as I know, affecting only PCs not Macs). Here is an article about that possibility, which also tells how to protect your computer.
Here is the somewhat detailed information sheet I put together for a week in Rome a couple years ago.
I did it because when we first worked out the places we wanted to visit, it turned out that if we weren't careful, we'd find "attractions" closed when we planned to visit.
So this information sheet helped us plan our visit, and, maybe more importantly, helped us change our plans quickly. (Being able to change plans efficiently can contribute to less wasted time and promote domestic tranquility!)
Putting all the information on one page was a great time saver once we were in Rome, when time is at a premium.
And this is the calendar I put together for our three weeks in Italy that year. The middle week, in Rosia, just south of Sienna, was a group stay, organized by Slow Travelers, including TourMomma.
These files were created in WordPerfect, and the conversions to Word format needed some touchups; the originals are easier to read/use.
We use itineraries like this for almost all of our traveling. But we never end up following them totally. They help us focus our thoughts in advance, and keep our expectations from wandering in conflicting directions. The latter can dampen traveling companion's enthusiasm. (I think I put that in a nice way.)
Like JonJohnsen, I use a calendar. The one attached is rudimentary, since four men in their 60's just do not require too much advanced planning, only to "blow the plan up" as things unfold.
This is a China trip arranged through a tour company (we are required to use a government sanctioned company, since it involves the "regulated" Great Wall Marathon)... therefore much of the itinerary is not discretionary, but the calendar approach works for my wife and I when we slow travel.
I do my travel documents and schedules in WordPerfect. I still find it much for flexible in formatting than Word or Excel. I exported my attachments to Word 2003 format, since most people can read those documents.
When we have to make an early departure from home, we either share and airporter van with others or find a good friend to drive us. BART just can't help with early flights.
Posts: 165 | Location: Richmond, CA | Registered: 29 December 2006
I print pages out,maps,reviews and alpha tab them in a 3 ring binder. I have had up to 100 pages! I demolish them assuming that more up to date info will be available. RR
I make a rough layout of where I want to go when\where and how much I am willing to pay. Then once flight reservations are made I plug them in and carry it all on one two sided sheet. I think planning is at least half the fun but you can over do it. Life happens those little glitches along the way are what we remember most JMHO
Here's an example using word and covering Ferrara, Bologna and Reggio with smatterings of other info (incl Parma and Modena).
A mix of hotel/travel info, plus various possibilities for food/drink etc.
One thought though. The info is compiled using a wide variety of sources, including copyrighted sources. The material has been summarised into my own format, which should assuage any fears of copyright infringements. Worth bearing in mind though...
During my time lurking on this site, I've been copying and pasting all kinds of info into a word doc format for a first time trip to Italy. I still have a ways to go, and I don't have even half of the information I need, but it's a start for me. Unfortunately, our Italy plans have been put off this year, but I'm aiming for 2010~~so I have a lot of time to add to it! (Hope I attached it right!)
Hi, I don't use a spreadsheet for trips instead I use a PDA. There is a program called iSilo that enables you to clip info from the web & put it into your PDA. I planned a 3 week trip through Italy in '07. iSilo enabled me to carry maps of the different cities we were visiting, The apts we rented & the requirements each rental agency had & contacts from rental agencies, metro schedules in Rome. Museum schedules in Florence, Rome, a list of Michelangelo's works & where they were located. A pic. of an Italian phone & how to use it, directions of how to call another country from Italy (that I got off slow Travel), restaurant reviews, places to see, Italian Rail map, sample itineraries, currency cheat sheets, how to count in Italian, locations of local grocery stores near our apts & more. I got a lot of the info from the Slow Travel site. The best part of all it all fit in a PDA that could fit into a man's shirt pocket or in my case my purse. It was invaluable to us on our trip. I would highly recommend it.
I create a spreadsheet file for planning my finances, with several worksheets within the file devoted to various ideas: a worksheet for major categories of expenses, which tells me how much money I'll need for each and how much I have (trains, planse, rental apartments, books, food and wine, clothes, and so forth); worksheets for estimating the expenses in each category; a worksheet for estimating how much of my income I can devote to each category per check (this has been challenging of late!); and a worksheet that grabs exchange rates from the web and tracks days until departure.
Of all of the various worksheets, the most important to me is the first one I mentioned -- the actual amounts in each category, which I add to or subtract from as the expenses arise. It's like balancing a checkbook. My plane tix are bought, for example, so that column is zeroed out and greyed as well. I'm still adding money to the food budget, so that column is active and in black. My trains column has all the money I think I'll need, but I haven't spent it yet: that's in blue.
Two features of this worksheet that I especially like: (1) The sheet tells me not only know how much I have in each category, but also how much I still need, since the sheet is linked to the other worksheets where I estimated and/or calculated the expenses; (2) Since I'm automatically tracking the dollar/euro exchange rate, I can work through different scenarios rather easily. In fact, I always plan a trip at a ridiculously high exchange rate: last May, when I started planning, I chose $1.70/euro as my benchmark (not so ridiculous at the time); since then the rate has been in the $1.25-$1.35 range, and I sometimes plug in the current, lower rate just to see how much money I might have left over, or how much buffer I will have, or how much extra I can devote to other expenses.
Oh, and I love my "days to departure" countdown.
Hope this makes sense, and that you find it helpful. I must say that my wife is the queen of spreadsheets, and I learned a lot by studying how she tracks our household expenses.
BJinNM - I am shamelessly appropriating your Venice restaurant section for our upcoming trip! Since we are also staying in an apartment in the Cannaregio, your spreadsheet looks like a goldmine.
That's what I hoped someone would do. We had such a good time eating!!! Here's the link to my Venice part of the trip and in it I describe in loving detail what we ate. http://www.slowtrav.com/tr/tripreport.asp?tripid=1603 Enjoy every minute of it. We loved staying in Cannaregio. BJinNM
BJinNM -- I too am shamelessly appropriating your spreadsheet. It brings back wonderful memories of Venice, and makes me long to return to Italy. I bow before your feet.
Here's a sad thing...my laptop runs Vista, and Vista will not allow me to open Word or Excel documents. (One reason I'm not in love with Vista ) Can anyone give me another method of opening these spreadsheets? I'd love to take a look... Janie, any ideas?
User, n. The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot." ~ Dave Barry Brenda
We have moved further discussion of the Vista/Word problem to this thread on the Technology forum.
We are hoping you will continue to provide us sample pages from your travel spreadsheets. We plan to convert them to documents we can post on our main Slow Travel planning pages.
Judy
Posts: 3919 | Location: Berkeley, CA | Registered: 22 March 2005
For me, part of enjoying travel is the unexpected, the things you discover along the way, the variations in itineraries you decide upon on the spur of the moment and are often based on things that happened to you while you were already there! You'll also find that unless you're very keen on very particular kinds of hotels, in most places (yes, even very touristy ones) you can just walk up to a hotel the day you want to stay there and provided it is before noontime you can probably find and book a room then and there. (shrug)
If I wanted to have my trip planned so precisely, I would just use a touring company, and not worry about it. After all, filling out a spreadsheet takes time that could be better spent....traveling, perhaps.
Well cyclo, I'm going to play devil's advocate a bit here.
quote:
For me, part of enjoying travel is the unexpected, the things you discover along the way, the variations in itineraries you decide upon on the spur of the moment
What itinerary? If you have variations, then you must plan something? And if you plan something, you must note it someway? So your "storage" method may not be a spreadsheet or detailed but it must be something, no? Even if it's hand-written pieces of paper or a list in your mind?
quote:
You'll also find that unless you're very keen on very particular kinds of hotels, in most places (yes, even very touristy ones) you can just walk up to a hotel the day you want to stay there and provided it is before noontime you can probably find and book a room then and there. (shrug)
Yes, you can, but that requires you taking time out from your traveling to find the hotel via either walking the streets, visiting the tourist information office, etc. And no guarantees you're successful with your first or even second attempt.
I'd much rather do my booking at home, from the comfort of my couch, and have more time available at my destination to enjoy my destination than spending the time searching for a hotel. Yes, it doesn't give me spur of the moment variation in destination, but it does give me more time at my destinations to enjoy them, rather than trying to find a place to stay, different strokes for different folks.
Remember, just because it may not be for you, doesn't mean it doesn't work for others, nor does having a plan (which you're not necessarily locked into) mean you're better off on an organized tour. I think if you read many of the responses here, you'll find that people often make these plans, but end up ditching them on occasion for more spontaneous activities - the plans are used for fall-back and options.
I used a rather elaborate spreadsheet for choosing my lodgings in Italy last year. It included columns for those items that were important to us: location, which floor the apartment was on, type of shower, price,any extra costs, and columns to summarize reviews/problems/raves from reviews for Slow Travel, Trip Advisor and Fodors, each in its own column.
I think there were some additional criteria I looked at, but I can't remember now.
Once the planning was done, I used PocketMod to make little itineraries, important numbers and information, and guides for places we were touring on our own.
My partner who likes to plan, for most of our recent trips, has produced a simple Word document that details our travel itinerary.
Normally it was on a letter form that listed by day or week, each location we had booked or place we had planned to stay in. Details about the bookings included the price, arrival times, contact information, etc.
We would also insert maps of the place we were staying at, for easy reference.
It also included the “in bound” and “out bound” flight information and the connecting travel information (train, bus, hired car, etc).
Attached is a sample of the itinerary we used when we walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain in 2007.
Doing the Camino de Santiago in Spain was part of the 3 month trip that included an arrival in Germany, a visit to Paris (on route to Spain), and the actual Camino de Santiago walk. This was followed by some additional visits to northern Spain and Portugal, and then a return trip through southern France, finally returning to Germany to fly home.
Since that trip we have changed the format to a booklet size, easy enough to insert into out money belts, for safe keeping. We used the new format when we walked the Via Francigena in Italy.
I have no great spreadsheet to offer...just a My 19yr-old daughter recently planned a driving trip for herself and her roommate...from Nashville to NYC. She did a fantastic job of planning out their week, leaving room for spontaneity, too. My smile came when she told me how she'd prepared a notebook, "just like you do, Mom"...YES! Another generation has caught the travel bug AND the organizing that makes it happen!
Posts: 129 | Location: Oklahoma City, OK | Registered: 16 June 2003
Never have used a spreadsheet. I use MAPS. This was originally posted somewhere on the France forum, I think:
"I agree with those who find trip planning fun, but I think it can be overwhelming when you use highly-detailed maps. Save them for driving! It is also difficult to keep track of all the unfamiliar town names in the early planning stages when you're getting information from lots of different sources.
Our travel style is to go in the off-season without reservations and play it by ear. But even if you plan to book every night ahead of time, this system would work to help you decide which towns to make your reservations in.
My system for trip planning is to get a basic map (like the Michelin 721 for France), have it copied full-size or larger at a copy shop in black-and-white on regular paper (map paper is too slick). Then get out the colored markers.
Highlight all the places people tell you about that sound good in one color. Mark highlights listed in your favorite guidebook in another color. Slow Forum advice in a 3rd color. Perhaps the spots visited by a tour company you respect in a 4th color...
After a while you will notice clusters of colored marks on your map. If you are playing it by ear, just take the map with you as you set off on your spontaneous journey. If you feel you must book ahead - either for peace of mind or because of the season - choose a town within or near each cluster for your base to visit the other villages/sites in that cluster. Link the overnight towns in a logical loop, and there's your trip!
Bring this map with you on your trip - along with your better driving maps - making it easier to decide which way to go when you come to a fork in the road. You can see what towns of interest are ahead on each route, and can quickly look them up in the guidebook to see which way you want to go.
Another tip for organizing your travel: buy those plastic (not paper, they aren't sticky enough) "Flags" made by 3M Post-Its, in at least 3 colors. Mark the day's travel as follows: choose one color for the lodgings/dining pages. I use red, like Michelin red, easy to remember. A second color for sight-seeing highlights (green like Michelin green) and a third color to mark the location of the pertinent maps. (A fourth color can mark items of interest for future days, if you're planning ahead.)
I find this works better than making tabs for each city, because it gives you instant access to the pages you will need that day, without confusing the issue. Each night, I move the markers to the next day's pages. The plastic flags will easily last a whole trip, whereas paper Page Markers lose their stickiness after one or two moves.
This system helps me both with trip planning, and with decision-making enroute. As we travel, I use another marker on the "real map" to trace our route and overnight stops. We've used this system for travelling without advance reservations in many countries, and it works well for us. Of course, we never travel in high season when going without reservations would likely mean sleeping in our car!"
I always save the map, both as a souvenir, and in case I get to go back to that country in the future. I can benefit from prior planning by seeing which highlighted towns we missed the first time and plan new loops to take in more of the country. While the guidebooks from the first trip will be sadly outdated, the planning map will still have value. We did this on our return to Italy last fall, 11 years after our earlier trip.
Another tool I use is a CALENDAR. I print out a monthly calendar for the weeks we'll be travelling and pencil in where I hope we'll be at each point in the trip. Any reservations for planes, lodging, of course will be inked in. At the top of the page, I make notes on events/sites that happen on specific days (e.g. market days for various villages, museum closures, etc.). These notes are arranged by the day of the week that they apply, so that when we are nearing a location we can see that the market is happening the next morning - perfect! - or the museum will be closed that day, and plan accordingly.
As we travel, I pencil in what we actually did and where we stayed, so I have our actual trip in a nutshell on the calendar and can use it as an index to find the right pages in my trip journal (a small bound book with lined pages)if I want to refer to my notes (for postings on forums like this one).
Posts: 104 | Location: Montana USA | Registered: 21 September 2007
As some others have chimed in with basically "No" answers to the question, I will too. As if we were taking a poll.
I keep both too much and too little information to get much use from an actual spreadsheet. Too much, because at the moment, for example, I have about 800 half-pages of cribbed stuff on Rome in 12 booklets, divided by categories. My booklets are created in a program called Adobe Indesign, a page layout, desktop publishing thing. I also have booklets for Paris and southern France, but they aren't nearly as extensive.
In the past I've printed them out on my laser printer in booklet form, double sided, to make actual little books. For our upcoming trip, I intend to have lulu.com print them as perfect bound books. Or maybe I'll borrow an iPod Touch and see if I can get a decent PDF reader. Anyhow, all the info is categorized and each item is numbered. I also have maps on which every item's number appears, so as we're walking around, I can check the relevant map (there are 16 for Rome) and see what we might want to see.
Note however that this is guidebook stuff, although it's information that's not in guidebooks. For planning, Loie merely keeps printouts of our apartment or gite rental agreement, plane flight stuff, car rental, etc. as she makes them. Those go into a small binder or envelope. As dedicated Slow Travelers, we never have more than one rental per trip, and if in the city, no car, so the pre-trip planning info is minimal. Maybe ten or twelve pages in her envelope. My guidebook type stuff is massive, as noted.
Then, I create a very simple list of things we'd like to do, and a list of days. Each trip day has a suggested activity. This is to avoid forgetting that a certain museum or attraction is closed on a certain day. Or, to ensure making an important reservation beforehand, say, for Sunday lunch on Sunday, and remembering it. But the List of Days is, with the exception of reservations or closings, always treated as a suggestion and reminder. We rarely end up following it. Weather, whim, being tired or energetic all influence the actual itinerary for each day.
I'll try to attach a PDF of a List of Days. Just for fun, as my formatting of this stuff is probably more geeky than most folks need or want.
I'm more of a notebook person, like Robert describes above - and the more we travel the thinner the notebook becomes actually - I find I need the basics (hotels, train info, restaurant reviews from ST, etc), and they are very helpful, but more and more I am using the extra notes less, just sitting back and enjoying the moments. That surprised me, as I thought I would get more and more organized, but this works for me.
I'm a person who gets into the details and so when I start planning a trip I put it in a calendar format in Excel and use color coding for people and activites/events. This allows me to know what's completed and what still needs to be scheduled. In this example the neon green areas still needed to be determined/reserved. Also, I'm making plans/reservations for more than myself.
I then put a Itinerary book together for two reasons: 1) so everyone has all travel logistics of who/what/where/when so in case I fall off the face of the earth the trip can continue, or if they get lost, etc. it's all there. 2) There's one place that lists everything you need to know for reservations, contact numbers, restaurant/site recommendations, etc. My vision isn't good enough to see the screens of palm pilots or blackberry's as they would be great to use.
The last two 4-week Italy/European trips included my parents and/or my son, and myself all leaving on different days, starting out in and arriving at different locations. This Itinerary book told them where they needed to go and how to get there.
Overkill? Maybe. But when everyone else leaves all the planning to me they have no clue on where they're staying and how to get there.
I also use this book to make notes for directions, restaurant/activity suggestions I get from people I meet, notes of what we did or what happended, etc., which comes in handy when typing up my trip report, handy reminder.
Originally posted by Robert Rainey: I print pages out,maps,reviews and alpha tab them in a 3 ring binder. I have had up to 100 pages! I demolish them assuming that more up to date info will be available. RR
I have used a similar system for the past decade. But I include a calendar, flight itineraries, e-tickets, airport maps, airline regulations (baggage allowances, contract of carriage, et cetera) and a contact list. Instead of alpha tabs, I use date tabs (1-31) inserting driving itineraries, scheduled events and clear plastic pockets to accumulate the flotsom and jetsom of the trip (like receipts and brochures). An unscheduled activities listing of sights, museums, restaurants, wineries, other shopping (ceramics, chocolate and fabric) and picnic opportunities are left in the back of the binder to be moved or removed as necessary. These binders have grown in recent years, so I am considering saving individual items on the "cloud" for next time. But there is something about the tactile feel of a printed page.
Spreadsheets are invaluable for vacation budgeting, projecting costs and comparing options. But we don't take them with us. Lately we have used Pocket Quicken for on the fly finances.
À votre santé !
Posts: 195 | Location: Connecticut, USA | Registered: 08 March 2006
Slow Travel Talk 
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My 19yr-old daughter recently planned a driving trip for herself and her roommate...from Nashville to NYC. She did a fantastic job of planning out their week, leaving room for spontaneity, too. My smile came when she told me how she'd prepared a notebook, "just like you do, Mom"...YES! Another generation has caught the travel bug AND the organizing that makes it happen!
