Soft vs Hard Itinerary

If you’re new here, I love a good itinerary. I’ve always LOVED seeing organized things and being an event planner by trade, I need organization in order to feel calm.

Some don’t enjoy making or traveling by an itinerary because it feels too structured. However, I hope to show you that an itinerary can offer you lots of room for spontaneity! I love an itinerary purely so I don’t waste time on my precious vacations.

When I’m building an itinerary for a trip, I separate things into 2 categories: soft and hard itinerary items.

hard itinerary examples:

• reservations set in stone

• flights

• accommodations

• some excursions

• reservations

When I start building my itinerary, I input the hard itinerary items first. My flight information, hotel confirmations, any excursions or transportation confirmations, and any meal reservations. These are items that are usually not going to change.

This format also allows me a great skeleton from which to work.

As you can see, I have my flight information entered, along with hotel confirmation and dinner reservations. I share this itinerary with my travel companions, and my parents and boyfriend, so they all know where we are and when.

If you do not want to create an itinerary but want a place to house your hard itinerary items, I use TripIt (app). It connects to your email account and automatically populates into the app so you have all of the information on your phone without any work from you.

soft itinerary examples:

• things that can be changed around

• meals, some excursions

• naps/downtime

I always make a list or a brain dump of restaurants, clubs/bars, museums, excursions, things to do that I can reference if we have a moment of pause about our current plan.

I’ll discuss with my travel companion what restaurants sound best to them and then I’ll put that into open spots in the itinerary. However, I almost never want that restaurant in the moment lol. That’s when it’s nice to have a list to pick from!

During this research period, I also like to look at menus and prices if possible and write a little description next to the restaurants so if we need to have a cheap eats meal, then we can easily find one. If we’re feeling a little bougie, we can find one easily as well!

I also do this with museums, cenotes in Mexico, etc. As you can see above, Berlin has a TON of museums, so I made a list of the museums, and we designated a “Museum Day,” where we went to as many museums as we could fit in.

Do this with bars, clubs, experiences, landmarks, etc. Then you can plug these in and move them around as you see fit. This is where the creativity and the fun begins :)

At the end of the day, your trip is your time! I feel like I’m wasting time if I just wander aimlessly with no set things to see or do, so that is why this works for me. Your itinerary should work for you, while also not making you feel locked into your schedule. It should act as a guide for your trip so you don’t feel like you’ve wasted time.