Timing Your International Itinerary

How Do You Book Flights, Cars, & Activities Without Feeling Rushed?

One of the most important parts of booking your vacation is ensuring that all the activities, flights, and other arrangements align perfectly so you’re not late for anything. Good timing is also important because it helps you reduce how much time you waste waiting around. However, creating the perfect itinerary where everything just flows beautifully does require a little research about your destination.

For example, your transit times may differ significantly based on whether you’re headed to a busy locale like Los Angeles or you’re traveling to the middle of nowhere in rural Iceland. Each of these locations offers a wealth of activities, but you won’t find it difficult to get around rural Iceland like you might during rush hour traffic in Los Angeles.

Therefore, timing your activities and flights and scheduling things like visits to restaurants takes a little research. Can you squeeze in that quick afternoon tour of the Candelaria area of Bogota before your flight to Medellin that evening? How early should you arrive at the airport when flying out of Paris? How long does it take to drive from Reykjavik to the Murals of Hellissandur on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula in western Iceland?

Depending on where you’re traveling and what you intend to do while on your vacation, you’ll need to answer quite a few questions as far as scheduling goes. A good schedule can go a long way in ensuring that you don’t feel stressed during your trip or always worried about whether you’ll get to your flight on time or whether the plane will take off while you’re stuck in traffic.

If your itinerary involves any plane travel or you plan on booking activities that have a specific starting time or meeting location, you’ll need to think about the clock as much as the cost of your trip. Don’t risk arriving late to your flight, activity, or hotel. Read on and learn what you need to consider when arranging your itinerary in a way that won’t make you feel stressed or worried during your journey.

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Putting Together All The Pieces of Your Itinerary

As you start to build your itinerary, you’ll begin to add different features to it, like your flights, transportation details, hotels, and activities. In my itineraries, I add all of those elements, as well as restaurants and maps, to everything we’ll do. One of the most valuable things you can do to make sure everything is arranged nicely is to incorporate maps and times into your itinerary.

For example, let’s imagine you’re traveling to New York City for a long weekend where you plan to arrive on Friday and depart on Monday. Your Saturday and Sunday are your main activity days, and you’ll do the most traveling on Friday and Monday. After looking at flights and figuring out that schedule, you’ll probably start looking at hotels and activities.

Questions you’ll want to ask yourself include:

• How long does it take to get to the hotel from the airport?
• Where are the pick-up, drop-off, or meeting points for our activities?
• What time do we need to leave the hotel to reach the airport?
• What are the transit times between the hotel, activities, and restaurants?

Each of these features of your trip takes travel time. If your flight lands at 1 PM at JFK and you’re flying in from another country, don’t expect to book a taxi that will pick you up at 1 PM. You need time to get off the plane and make it through customs, which can get mildly hairy when you’re coming out of JFK and heading into Manhattan.

Furthermore, if you have a restaurant you want to visit on your first night in NYC, make sure your timing makes sense for arriving at the airport, taking a taxi, getting to your hotel, and then getting to the restaurant. Each of these parts of your vacation will require time, whether that’s spent in a rental car, a taxi, or on foot.

When I create a travel itinerary, I literally block out absolutely every hour from when I wake up until I go to sleep. I even note when I won’t be doing anything at all. Maybe I plan to lounge by the pool for a few hours after arriving at the hotel. I don’t try to commit this activity to memory. I put it in my itinerary along with the times I expect to enjoy it. Every piece of your itinerary should have a time associated with it. Trust me, you’ll love not having to worry about when anything starts or ends. It’ll all be there for you to print out or view as a digital file on your phone.

Is The Three Hour Rule At Airports Really True?

One of the general pieces of wisdom that you’ll find across the internet these days is arriving at least three hours before international flights and anywhere from 90 minutes to two hours before your domestic flight. In some cases, you’ll need all of those three hours because the lines at the airport are just sickeningly long.

When I flew out of LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) on a trip to Colombia, we arrived at the airport three hours early, but the line to simply drop off our luggage at the counter took us over an hour. Unfortunately, there was no way to bypass the line either. Even though we’d already checked into our flight via my phone and had already paid for checked luggage, we still had to wait in the line.

Then, after we were done with that line, we had to get in another one to get through security. That line, too, was pretty long, especially since it was the only line available for all the international flights at the airport. Our overnight flight was at 8:45 PM, and it was a good thing we arrived at the airport around 5 PM because we needed a good chunk of time to get through two huge lines.

By the end of everything, we had about 30 minutes to sit at the gate before boarding started for our flight. We weren’t exactly running through the airport “Home Alone” style, but we were still thankful that we had the time. However, you can’t take my experience here as guidance for all your trips. Truthfully, the airport you plan to fly out of can have a giant impact on how early you need to get to the airport.

Let me take Iceland as an example. When we flew out of Reykjavik on our return journey to Los Angeles, we got to the airport a good three hours before our flight. Even though the airport was pretty full of people, there just wasn’t the crazy factor like there always is at Los Angeles International Airport (and similar places like JFK in New York). We sat on our butts for more than two hours, twiddling our thumbs, because security took less than 20 minutes.

So, the moral of the story? Do a few internet searches for personal stories about various airports. If you ever fly in or out of Los Angeles International Airport, just go with the three-hour rule. However, if you’re using a smaller airport, do a little reading online. You might find that two hours is plenty of time – more than enough – to get to your flight.

Create an Itinerary That Doesn’t Rush You

No matter the style of trip you’re planning, it’s tempting to try to fit as much as you can into every day you travel. I know you want to see every single amazing landmark in Paris, but if you’ve only got two days, can you really appreciate the City of Light if you don’t have a few minutes to admire the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe?

You may be bound by the number of days you have available to travel as far as how many amazing adventures you can stuff into your itinerary. I can tell you from experience that I have almost always wanted more time in every country I’ve visited. However, just because you can’t spend a whole month there doesn’t mean you should forgo the experience entirely.

It simply takes some tough decision-making, as well as the knowledge that if your vacation is amazing, there’s no reason you can’t visit again in the future, and take a deeper dive into one of the towns you visit on a future international vacation. As I write this, my next trip will include one precious day in Paris, and I’ve chosen my activities and created my schedule with serious care.

My final destination isn’t Paris, but the opportunity to spend a day there came about due to the fact that we will have a layover there. By extending our vacation by one day (we’re leaving Friday instead of Saturday), I was able to fit in a day in Paris to our itinerary. Do I expect to see absolutely every face of Paris, as well as get a tour of Versailles?

As much as it pains me to say it, the answer is no. I won’t get to see absolutely everything. I’ve chosen two tours that will offer us a beautiful slice of life in Paris before we depart for Africa. My time in Paris is limited, but I haven’t filled my itinerary with as many tours and adventures as possible. I’ve made a few decisions on our experiences, knowing that getting to appreciate travel without a totally packed schedule is far superior to getting to see “everything” during a stressful time crunch.

Using Red-Eye Flights to Pack More Fun Into Your Vacation

If you want to stuff as much as possible into your itinerary, and you’re not willing to give anything up as far as your experiences go, one piece of advice I can offer you is to use red-eye flights to your advantage. If you feel confident that you can sleep a bit on the plane and that traveling overnight won’t totally wreck you, a red-eye flight can help you use your time most effectively.

Let’s take my travel to Colombia. Our flight left after 8 PM, and we arrived in Bogota around 5 AM. By spending the night traveling to a different location rather than sleeping in a hotel, we were able to hit the ground running and enjoy a tour on our very first day in Bogota. If we had flown during the day, we might have arrived too late on our first day to enjoy a guided tour or anything substantial.

All it took was arranging to leave on a red-eye the night before our international itinerary and tours began. We left on a Wednesday night and arrived on Thursday morning rather than leaving on a Thursday morning and arriving that night. Both me and my traveling partner were able to work on Wednesday, and then we spent that evening on an airplane rather than in our own bed.

My trip to Iceland also featured the same style of travel. We flew overnight to the capital of Iceland, Reykjavik, from Los Angeles (with a layover in Minneapolis) and arrived on the island at about 7 AM. After picking up our rental car (we saw Iceland as a road trip), we headed into Reykjavik for breakfast and then took a few hours to enjoy ourselves at a hot spring.

If we’d left during the day instead and spent the entire day traveling, the timing for arriving in Reykjavik wouldn’t have been nearly as convenient. Why spend an entire day traveling when you can sleep on the plane and enjoy a more convenient itinerary? Now, I will say that red-eye flights aren’t for everyone, but they can definitely help you maximize your time at your destination should you choose to fly overnight.

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