A Notion Travel Planner for Trips, Packing and Expenses
Plan trips, build packing lists, track expenses and keep bookings in one free Notion travel template: everything in one link while you're actually travelling.
Trip planning happens in fragments: a flight confirmation in email, an apartment booking in a different email, a list of recommendations in a message thread, and a vague plan held in someone's head. It holds together until you're standing in an airport trying to find a booking reference on bad wifi.
The free Travel Planner puts the trip, the packing, the expenses and the bookings in one place, which mainly matters at the moment you need any of them quickly.
One page you can open offline
The single most useful property of a travel document is being available when connectivity isn't. Booking references, addresses in the local language, the accommodation phone number, and how you're getting from the airport. Notion's mobile app keeps recently viewed pages available offline, so open it before you fly.
- Flight and train details with booking references and terminal information.
- Accommodation addresses, check-in times and contact numbers.
- Transport from the airport, decided in advance rather than at 1am on arrival.
- Copies of passport and insurance details, stored somewhere you can reach them.
- Emergency contacts and the local equivalent of an emergency number.
The packing list gets better every trip
A packing list written from scratch each time forgets the same things repeatedly. Written once and reused, then amended after each trip with whatever you missed or never used, it converges within three or four trips on something genuinely accurate for how you travel.
The best packing list is last trip's list, with two things added and three removed.
Track spending while you're there, not after
Holiday spending is almost impossible to reconstruct afterwards, because of currency conversion, shared costs and the general blur of a good week. Logging as you go takes seconds and does two useful things: it stops the end-of-trip statement being a shock, and it makes splitting costs with travel companions a factual conversation rather than a diplomatic one.
Plan less than you want to
An itinerary with something scheduled every hour turns a holiday into a logistics exercise, and the moments people actually remember are usually the unplanned ones. One anchor per day, the thing you'd be disappointed to miss, and open space around it. The list of possibilities can be long; the schedule shouldn't be.
Keep the trip afterwards
Spend ten minutes when you get back noting what worked, what you'd skip, and where you'd stay again. It's the cheapest possible travel research for next time, and it's the sort of detail that's vivid for a fortnight and gone within a year.
Duplicate the Travel Planner and start with the packing list, it's the part that pays off on every future trip too.