Travel itinerary mind map

Fix the dates and the base

Put the trip at the root: the city, the dates and the number of nights. Under it, three children that everything else depends on: when you arrive and how, where you are staying with the address, and when you leave. A map without a base has no travel times in it.

Choose the base before you plan a single stop. Staying near a transit line rather than near the thing you want to see often buys you an hour a day, and an hour a day is the difference between three stops and five. Write the neighborhood in the label so the days can be grouped by area.

Give yourself a light first and last day. Arrival days lose time to airports, luggage and check-in, and departure days lose it again, so one stop near the base is usually enough. Put the flexible stops in the middle, where a rained-out morning can absorb them without rewriting the trip.

• The root names the destination and the dates
• Children: arrival, base with address, departure
• The base is chosen for transport, not for the view
• Arrival and departure days carry one stop each

Note: If you are traveling to more than one place, treat each base as its own root branch rather than one long list. A map with two roots of three days is far easier to hold in your head than one with six days in a row.

One branch per day

Give each day its own branch and name it with the date and the neighborhood you will be in: Day 3, Thursday 15 May, Old Town. Dates on the label matter, because a plan without dates is a wish list. Use Shift+Enter to add the next day as a sibling in seconds.

Under the day, add one child per stop, labeled with the name of the place and the time you intend to be there. Three to five stops a day is a realistic number once meals and walking are counted. The Travel Plan template, one of the 13 starters, already has the day-and-stop shape if you would rather start from something.

Under each stop, add the detail you will want when you are standing there: what it is, how long to allow, and one line on why you chose it. The reason matters more than the address, because on the day you will need to choose between two nearby options.

• One branch per day, labeled with the date
• Three to five stops per day once meals are counted
• Shift+Enter adds the next day quickly
• Every stop says why it is on the list

Note: A day branch with nine stops is a list of possibilities, not a plan. Keep the alternates as a child node called if the weather is bad, so the real day stays readable.

Fit the day to opening hours

Opening hours decide the order of the day, so record them on the stop itself. Add children for when it opens, when it closes, when the last entry is, and how long you need. A church that shuts at 17:00 is a morning stop, and you cannot tell that from its name.

Write the hours in the rich note on the stop node, with the month and the year, and check whether the site changes its hours on holidays. Museum ticket offices often close an hour before the museum does, and a closed ticket desk at 16:00 turns a good afternoon into a wasted one.

Leave slack on purpose. Put a note on the day branch saying whether the schedule is tight, normal or relaxed, and protect the relaxed days. If every day is tight, the trip becomes a sequence of queues, and the days you remember will be the ones you had nowhere to be.

• Open, close, last entry and duration are children of the stop
• Hours in the note include the month and the holiday check
• Ticket offices often close before the site does
• Label each day tight, normal or relaxed

Note: Opening hours change, and a map that was right in March is wrong in September. Add the date you checked next to the hours, so a stale entry is obvious rather than misleading.

Weigh travel time between stops

Add a child node between each pair of stops for the journey: the mode and the minutes. Walking, one metro change and a taxi take very different amounts of a day. The travel node is where the arithmetic happens.

Add up the day and check it against the hours you have. Stops plus travel plus a long lunch is often nine hours of walking and waiting, which is a long day in a heat and a bad day with luggage. If the total is over eight hours, cut a stop before you leave home.

Shape the day around the geography rather than the list. Put the stops nearest the base at the start and the end of the day, and the furthest one in the middle, so you are not crossing the city twice. Checking the shape on a map is faster than planning around it, so do it early.

• Each stop carries a travel node with the mode and the minutes
• Stops plus travel plus meals should land under eight hours
• The furthest stop goes in the middle of the day
• Cut a stop rather than compressing the walking

Note: Travel time is the number people forget and the number that ruins days. Ten minutes saved on four journeys is forty minutes back, which is usually one more stop or one longer lunch.

Reserve the things that need booking

Make a booking branch for anything that has to be reserved: the museum, the dinner, the train, the show. Under each, add the date, the time, the cost, and the confirmation reference. That last one belongs in plain text in the rich note, so you can read it out at a desk.

Book in order of scarcity. The hard-to-get ticket in the trip should be bought first, because it constrains the day around it. Write the booking deadline on the node as well, so you know when a decision is no longer reversible.

Keep the paperwork on the map. Node images accept PNG, JPEG, WebP and GIF files up to 1.5 MB, so a screenshot of a ticket or a saved map image can sit on the booking node, and double-clicking the thumbnail opens it. Tickets in an email are one search away from being lost on a bad connection day.

• A booking node holds the date, time, cost and reference
• Confirmation numbers are typed into the note as well
• The scarcest booking is bought first
• Deadlines are written on the node next to the booking

Note: Screenshot images are convenient but they blur. Type the reference number as well, because a number is faster to read at a counter than a picture of one.

Keep the offline copy with the confirmations

The map you plan in is the map you travel with, so it has to work with no signal. Canvasola keeps the current document in the browser's local storage automatically, and the app runs without a connection. The offline guide covers how to install it and check that it is ready.

Print a paper copy before you leave. The Print action opens your browser's print dialog, so you can send the page to a printer. Print the day branches you need, not the whole map, and check the tree is readable at that size before you commit to ten pages.

Cloud sync is a setting you turn on yourself, so do not depend on it mid-trip. If you want a copy on your phone, open the project file there, and keep the printed confirmations with your passport. The offline travel guide covers the checks, and the budget map takes the per-stop costs off this map.

• Local autosave keeps the current document on the device
• The app works without a connection once it has loaded
• Print the days you need, not the whole map
• Confirmation numbers are typed, not only photographed

Note: Do not clear the browser's site data on a trip, because the autosaved document lives there. If you clear it or switch device, the map goes with it unless you saved a project file first.

A checklist you can reuse

• The root label names the destination, the dates and the number of nights
• Arrival, base with address and departure are on the map
• Every day branch carries its date
• Each stop records opening hours, last entry and the time needed
• Travel nodes give the mode and minutes between stops
• Each day adds up to under eight hours of stops, travel and meals
• Bookings hold a reference number typed into the note
• A printed copy of the key days exists before departure

Common mistakes to avoid

• Planning stops without hours. A list of famous places with no opening hours produces a trip spent outside locked doors. Put the hours on the stop, with the month you checked.
• Ignoring travel time. Three stops can cost the whole day once you add the journeys between them. Add a travel node to every stop and check the total before you commit.
• Booking the easy things first. The restaurant that accepts a booking any day gets booked last, after the show that sells out. Book by scarcity and let the rest fit around it.
• Only screenshots of confirmations. A photographed confirmation is hard to read on a bright screen at a counter. Type the reference into the note as well.
• Trusting the cloud copy. Sync is opt-in and needs a connection. Keep the plan on the device, keep a printed copy, and do not clear the browser's site data while you are away.

Frequently asked questions

How many stops fit into one day?

Three to five once travel, meals and waiting are counted. Six stops is a day of continuous walking, and it leaves no room for the thing you did not know you wanted to see. A shorter day is what people remember about a trip.

Does the itinerary work with no signal?

Yes. Canvasola runs in the browser without a connection and keeps the current document in local storage, so the plan and the confirmations stay available in a queue or a basement. Open the app on the device before you travel so it is already installed and loaded.

Can I get a PDF of the itinerary?

There is no direct PDF export. The Print action opens your browser's print dialog, and you can choose to print the page or save it as a PDF from there. That also means you can adjust the scale and the page range before you commit to paper.

How do I keep track of what the trip costs?

Give each stop and booking node a cost, then read the totals into a budget map so the categories can be compared and challenged. Keeping the numbers on the itinerary is quicker, but a separate budget map shows where the money is going across the whole trip.

This guide is part of the mind map use cases collection. For the wider product tour, read the complete Canvasola guide, and keep the keyboard shortcut cheat sheet open while you work.