For people who plan their own vacations, keeping track of everything can be tough. Hotel reservations, rental car confirmations, airline ticket purchases, and activity information is easy to get, but how do you keep track of it all?
In our family, we have a traveling teen in the mix as well. He’s 18 and attending college nine hours from home. I schedule his plane rides home or my hotel stays when I drive to Alabama to see him. Having an email travel organizer helps me manage his trips, my trips and our family trips. No more searching the inbox frantically to find important reservation numbers or confirmations the day before travel for me!
Create your own email travel organizer and plan like a pro! Here’s how:
- Create a folder or label (for gmail users) for your trip. Label it “<Destination> <month> <year>.” For “simple” vacations, such as beach trips or mountain home rentals, this may be all you need.
- If you’ll be doing a lot on your trip or will have multiple destinations, consider subfolders:
- Reservations/Confirmations. Hotel (including overnight stays along the way), airline and rental car.
- Activities in <city/location>. I use this for tickets purchased online, groupon and living social deals that I actually purchase.
- Ideas to consider. I make this for travel and tourism info that I collect (I email myself links to websites about attractions in the area), because I can never remember everything I request. That way, when we review ideas before travel, I can easily find the information. As I eliminate ideas, I simply delete the email. Eventually, we get down to the things we really want to do.
- Once folders are set up, simply drag the email into its appropriate folder for safe keeping. You’ll never have to hunt for important information again.
Creating an email travel organizer for each trip, whether long or short, helps me keep track of actual trips and even those “maybe someday” dream vacations. I can easily manage my son’s travel, family weekends at his college, trips to grandma’s house, and vacations far and near, long and short. Since creating my email travel organizer system, vacation information is easy to manage.
Do you have an organizing tip to manage your vacation travel planning? Please share it with us!
Happy travels!
This is a suburb idea! I have created other destination folders for important emails but not used the idea for planning vacation. I’m a little retentive when it comes to organization so this idea will fit nicely into my life! Thanks
I’m so glad it’s helpful. Happy planning!
Karen, once again you have such great information!! What a great idea. I just have to say your site is wonderful and I always love visiting!!
Thanks, Kathy! I’m so glad we are cyber-friends.
When we did Disney I bought one of those PassPorter’s books. They had it organized by day with pockets for each day to put printed emails in. That worked well too, but your way is cheaper!
Cheap is good! 🙂
Good thing my blog is named Family Travels on a Budget. tee hee. Really, I like to do things well and as inexpensively as possible, so this is great feedback. Thanks!
Thank you! Now that I know how to be organized I can hardly wait to take a trip!
With the family? Or with fashion? 😉
That’s a really cool way to use labels in e-mail to organize trips. never thought about using tabs that way.
Thanks, Dominique. Email is our friend!
You always have great ideas! Geez! We take so many trips and with having a family of 6 this would really come in handy!
Thank you! If you use it, let me know how it works for you.
Great tips!
Traveling with a child is hard work. I know….I drove down to Florida from NY with a toddler and a 10 year old for 18 hours.
Khloé Gadson
CEO – INTERIOR DESIGNER/EVENT PLANNER
KG STYLE DESIGNS
http://www.kgstyleblogs.com