Today we are going to learn more about using Travel-Wise’s Trip Planner. The Trip Planner is designed from the ground up to be flexible and cater to all sorts of trip planning, from hiking, international travel, local road trips, and extended stays for the digital nomad. The planner helps keep things organized and allows you to spend less time researching and more time finalizing the plan, journaling your experiences, and sharing your adventure.
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Our recent trip to Turkey
Recently my wife and I took a month-long trip to Turkey. The trip was excellent, and we worked the whole time as digital nomads because the time difference between home and Turkey allowed us to adventure during the daytime and worked in the evening. This, of course, required rigorous planning and complexities along the route. We traveled to almost all stretches of Turkey and had a far-from-relaxed schedule each day. We’d work from 7 PM to 3-4 AM. But we made it work through and had a great time!
Further, a friend and his family joined us for the trip’s first half, adding extra communication overhead and logistics. We traveled together, booked private guides and hotels, and coordinated flights. Travel-Wise helps track all those logistics and is a convenient place to record the information. Everyone can update their travel information accordingly, so we all have access to the details and plans of our group.
This kind of trip, of course, takes a lot of planning. We did a lot of this tedious planning the “old-fashioned way.” Check out here to see our planning strategies. As we traveled through, I used Travel-Wise’s trip planner to create the trip outline, journaled where we visited, and attached screenshots to the journals by the end of the trip. By the end of the trip, I created several itinerary templates for others to use to make their planning more accessible. Then, I have a lovely card that I could share with others so they could see my trip live while and after we traveled, and now can, others can use our templates to make their travels easier. This is the dream of Travel-Wise, a community-driven culture to create, share, and live the travel spirit.
Searching for Templates
The first step to kick off your planning is to search our itinerary template database and see if any templates match the activities you hope to experience. Even if some are not a perfect match, you can still add them to your new trip plan to quickly get some ideas and outlines. You can customize it further with the day-to-day planner.
This whole process is designed from the ground up to give you an easier time creating your custom travel plans and saving time and research. Of course, you should still research, but the templates are thorough cookie-cutter experiences you can add to your trip and then build off. Many templates can be added to your trip plan to get the outline of the trip. Then, you can dive in and customize from there. You will see your trip planner will reference the itineraries added to it automatically.
Given I went to Turkey recently, we did the travel planning manually for this trip. However, I documented the entire trip and journaled it along the way. Now it is relatively easy for me to create many segmented itineraries on my trip and make them available for others. If you want to relive my trip or use it as a baseline for your own, you can mix and match the segments together in your trip. Check them out here and see how quick it is to start building plans for your next trip. If you make changes and enjoy your trip, you can create new itineraries the same as I did for others to use and some may prefer your templates over others offered.
Outlining the trip before you go with the day-to-day planner
Once you’ve found some templates to use as your boilerplate for your trip then, you can start customizing your trip. In the worst case, if you cannot find any templates to your liking on Travel-Wise, the Trip Planner is still robust enough to allow you to make your plan. Be sure to create some templates from your plan after the trip! Segmented itineraries by region work the best as they allow others to mix and match their customization easier.
Start customizing with the Trip Planner’s day-to-day planner. You must be one of the trip’s owners to start editing these fields, and the fields will lock once the trip begins. However, it can still be manually opened to edit at any time with the menu. The day-to-day planner allows you to move days around events, add/remove days or events, and customize them entirely to your preference. This is a bit more granular, but if the templates helped give you the outline, there should be less granularity needed. However, the tooling allows complete customization to get the trip outline where it needs to be.
You can be as detailed or light on details as you please. For example, perhaps you want to outline the trip by saying you will be in this city for five days and then leave it open to where the wind takes you. Or you want a jam-packed and efficient plan that details and maximizes your time spent in every location you visit. The choice is yours, and the tooling is designed to give you that flexibility.
Inviting and making arrangements with others
Once you have the trip outline where it needs to be, start inviting your friends and family that will join you on the trip! They could go so far as to help with the planning and outline or at least have all the information available. Travel-Wise is mobile-friendly and can be installed anywhere. Most importantly, it ensures you have access to your trip plan, even while offline. So your plan will always be available to you and will act as a guide for your trip.
Further, everyone can use the trip plan to journal their experience for great memories! Lastly, arrival and departure coordination can be complex. Different members of the trip may not stay for the entirety of the trip or arrive late into the trip. So they can make a note of all their arrival and departure information individually in the notes to always keep this information available front and center for themselves and others.
Journaling live as you go
Okay! Now you have your trip planned. It is time to enjoy your trip. A critical aspect of Travel-Wise is enabling users of the trip planner to journal their trip experience. Each individual on the trip can add their entries, including the ability to add pictures.
Many of the joys of traveling are learning, experiencing new things, and taking a little piece of that back with you. Journaling is super helpful to look back and remember these experiences for years. So we encourage you and your partners in the journey to give it a try and share your grand adventure with others!
Share your adventure
Today, all sorts of social platforms exist, or you might have a blog you like to share your experiences on. Travel-Wise aspired to ensure we support as many platforms as possible to allow you to share your experience with our various card formats across the places you trust.
With a complete trip outline and many journal entries about the trip. It is fantastic to look at a trip map and see everywhere you go and how it relates to the various journal and photo entries. The tooling creates a level of immersion to help others visualize your trip and experience.
Sharing is optional; if you wish to keep your Trip Plan secret, that is an option too. You can print your trip plan and the entire card format. Printing can be physical paper or PDF documents that you can save to your documents where you please. Travel-Wise strives to build the tools to make your next travels faster, less stressful, and a better experience than ever. We know customization and options are essential!
In conclusion, we hope this helps outline and better picture Travel-Wise tooling. If you choose to use Travel-Wise for your future travels, please let us know what you think and what we can do better, and we will continue to be the best travel tooling available.