Multi-stop trip planner: organize it without a spreadsheet

For each booking on a multi-stop trip, record four things: what it is with its reference, when it starts and ends, which stop it belongs to, and what it was booked around. Put one booking on each line, in time order. The fourth item is what a spreadsheet leaves out.

This is for a trip with three or more stops and more than a handful of bookings, planned by one person. It doesn't pick your route, price it or split costs, and it doesn't cover a single-destination trip.

Example: two weeks, three stops

Say you're flying from New York to Lisbon, taking a train to Porto, then flying to Madrid and home. You have a flight, a hotel and a tour in Lisbon, a train and a hotel in Porto, a flight to Madrid, a hotel and a dinner in Madrid, and the flight home. That's ten bookings, and most of them only make sense because of another one.

The record, one line per booking

An illustration with invented references. Read down the fourth column and you can see the chain.

The method

1. List the fixed points first: anything with a reference and a time. Flights, trains, stays, tours and reserved dinners. Leave the open days open.
2. Put them in time order, not by stop. The order you'll live them in is the order you'll need them.
3. Give each one a line with four things: what it is and its reference, when, which stop it belongs to, and what it was booked around.
4. For the last one, write only the single thing that would make this booking wrong if it moved. A transfer is built on a flight. A check-in is built on the transfer.
5. Add each booking after the one it depends on, so the chain reads top to bottom.
6. Copy the references onto one page you can read in three seconds. See how to write a one-page trip itinerary for the layout.

Time zones across stops

Write every time as the local time where it happens, and put the zone once beside each stop, not on every line. In the example, Madrid is an hour ahead of Porto. A flight that leaves Porto at 11:50 and takes about an hour and a quarter lands at 14:05 by Madrid clocks, and it's the arrival that gets misread if you write 13:05. Note the zone at each stop, convert once where two stops meet, and write the difference down.

When one thing moves

The fourth column earns its keep here. If the flight to Madrid moves to 14:20, look at what's built on it: the Madrid hotel, and below it the dinner. The Porto hotel and everything before it are unaffected, because earlier bookings don't depend on later ones. The full method is in what else your trip depends on.

One page per stop

If ten lines becomes forty, split the record by stop and keep a summary page on top with only the flights and trains that link the stops. Each stop page is short enough to hold in your head, and the summary shows the seams. That's about as far as this method needs to go.

What can go wrong

• You skip the fourth column because you can remember it. You can, until you're at a gate at 06:00 and it's the sixth change.
• You plan every hour of every day. A schedule like that is wrong by day three. Record the fixed points and leave the rest open.
• You order the list by stop, so one stop's bookings sit together and a train that leaves the next day is separated from its hotel. Sort by time.
• Several people on different legs. Add a name to each line, as how to plan a group trip does.
• One stop needs a visa or documents the others don't. Note it on that stop's line and check what to carry and where to note it.

Questions about planning a multi-stop trip

Where a Companion helps

Travel Companion holds the same four things per booking: kind, title and reference, start and end times, the stop it belongs to, and one booking it depends on. Add the earlier booking first, because you choose what a booking depends on only when you add it. Record a change on a booking's time and it shows the bookings downstream, unchanged so far. It's one trip per account, times are kept as you type them, its city list for time zones is short, and dates show in day-month order with 24-hour times. Most fields can't be edited after you add them. The trip book is blank paper you fill in by hand.