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Building the Itinerary
EVERYONE'S DIFFERENT ~ THERE'S NO MAGIC FORMULA
The basic itinerary -- where you will be on each day of your trip -- is the heart of your vacation plan. We encourage you not to rush into it, or to start out making too many unnecessary assumptions until you've had a chance to look at your alternatives as well as to check that your plan makes sense. Whatever you read here, or in a book, or hear from friends or relatives, it is still a matter of what works for you, so we cannot give you a rigid formula for putting the itinerary together. Feel free to deviate from the order of planning shown in our Planning Sequence Chart if your situation requires it. |
We've prepared this website with the idea that you still have some flexibility about some or all of these issues. So we give you lots of options to read about where, when, and how to travel. You can choose the ones you want to read about. It's best to do that reading before your itinerary gets finalized and set in stone.
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LAYING OUT THE ITINERARY
Keep it simple for starters. Don't start out trying to plan for every hour of every day. You can add the detail later. Take a piece or paper -- or use a word processing or speadsheet program on your computer -- and make a simple list of dates and locations, something like this....
9-12 - Sat - Fly from home (no hotel...night spent on airplane)
9-13 - Sun - Arrive in Rome for first night in hotel in Italy
9-14 - Mon - Rome
9-15 - Tue - Train to Florence
9-16 - Wed - Florence
9-17 - Thurs - Train to Venice
9-18 - Fri -
Last night in hotel in Italy, in Venice
9-19 - Sat - Fly home (no hotel...sleep at home)
Be very careful about the dates and the days of the week. A mistake here, such as leaving out a day, can really wreck your vacation and cost you big money. |
GET THE BASICS RIGHT -- WHERE YOU WILL BE AND WHEN
This may seem too obvious, but we've seen some big mistakes made by travelers who made quick, bad assumptions about travel dates, especially when they failed to take into account the effect of flying through different time zones. When people call our travel agency and give us an arrival date in Italy, we always ask, instead, for the date when they are flying from home, to avoid the common confusion about the day of departure from the USA versus the day of arrival in Italy.
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| You should start your itinerary with a departure date from your home. Then you need to know what your first day will be in Europe. For travelers from North America -- USA, Canada, Mexico -- normally your first day in Europe will be the DAY AFTER your departure from home, because you will probably spend your first night on the airplane. You are traveling from west to east, "against the clock," so that you seem to lose time as you fly into other time zones. For an American traveling to Italy, day 1 of the trip is the day to leave home and fly out, and day 2 is usually the day to arrive in Italy. Most travelers from North America (but not all) spend the night of day 1 on the airplane, so that the first night in a hotel in Italy is on day 2. |
The last day of your itinerary is the day you get home. If you are flying from Italy to the USA, you will probably get home on the same day that you fly from Italy. You are flying "with the clock," so that you seem to be gaining time as you fly from east to west into new time zones. It's just the reverse of what happened as you flew to Europe at the start of your trip. On this last day of your trip itinerary, you will not be booking a hotel, because you will be sleeping in your own bed at home. |
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| SO, for a traveler from North America, when you prepare your trip itinerary, you will probably want to book your first night in hotel on the second day of your trip (remember, your first night will be spent on the airplane). And you will NOT want to book a hotel on the last night of your itinerary, because you will be getting home that day. All this should become more clear when you start checking flight schedules. |
TRY TO AVOID COMMITMENT UNTIL YOU KNOW IT CAN ALL BE DONE
Maybe you don't have a choice, so the options we present on this website don't matter. Maybe your vacation dates are set in stone, so it is not a question of when you will travel. Maybe you are using flights you got with mileage awards, and you have no choice about where to fly in and out of Europe. Or maybe it was clear from the very start of dreaming up this trip, that you were going to spend your honeymoon in Tuscany, and so that none of the other options for Italy really matter.
But whenever possible, we suggest that you avoid making too many commitments until you have given plenty of thought to your trip plan. Here are some common examples...
Most people start out assuming that they must pick one airport, and one city, for flying both into and out of Italy. Later on, as they learn more about planning a trip to Italy, they realize that the itinerary works a lot better if they fly into one city and out of another. This happens all the time with trips to Rome and Venice. But many people start right out buying roundtrip flights through Rome, and are stuck with that commitment. Check your flight options early in the planning process, when you can still adjust the itinerary.
Or, you could build an itinerary that assumes a car rental on a Sunday, and later find out that at the location where you want to pick up the car, the rental office is not open on a Sunday. Check your options for picking up and dropping the car.
Or, you could buy your flights based on an itinerary that assumes being in a hotel on the Cinque Terre on a certain set of dates, then learn that there are just no rooms available on those dates, but there is no way to change the travel dates at that point, and so you must delete the Cinque Terre from your trip. Check hotel availability.
Or, you could plan your itinerary from Rome to Venice with a one-day stop at the Cinque Terre, or Lake Como, then learn that you will spend so much time on the trains, due to travel time and connections, that there is not enough time left to justify that stop. Check the train schedules and travel times to see if it makes sense.
Don't take this idea of delaying commitment to an extreme. It's good to get to the point of making commitments sooner than later, or you may risk losing a good airfare, or miss the last room available in a key hotel. In our Planning Sequence Chart, we've suggested a good general order for making commitments. But we also know that every trip is different, and so you may have good reason, or no choice, about doing things in a different order.
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