The Best Vacations Start With a Great Itinerary, Whether on a Tour or Alone

The humble itinerary is a little-appreciated aspect of travel. It can be a work of art when carefully and creatively planned. I thrill to receive my schedule for trips.

I read the agendas in tour brochures for pleasure, and I have devised a few myself that were deeply satisfying, like the itinerary I created for a challenging independent visit to China in 1996.

I’m a born planner, so itinerary-making is second nature. But it’s not that way for everyone. Many travelers with time, money and imaginations as wide as the sky get completely messed up when they try to make a plan.

The first step is easy: deciding where you want to go, how long you can spend, whether you want to tour several countries or focus on one place. The next is knowing when to seek help by calling a travel agent or booking a package trip. “You can buy an airplane ticket yourself on the Internet,” says Marc Mancini, who teaches in the travel industry program at West Los Angeles College, “but should you book a cruise or tour on your own?”

Mancini says the differences among cruise and tour packages and even among hotels in the same chain are so great that people who make bookings themselves, without the help of a knowledgeable agent, do so at their own risk.

Besides cruises and tours, long, complex trips to exotic places sometimes require the expertise of a travel agent or tour company. Louanne Kalvinskas, co-owner of Distant Lands, a Pasadena travel book and gear shop, says she easily organized a trip for herself and her sister to the Pacific Northwest in September. But when she started thinking about going to Ethiopia last year, she found a package tour that suited her fine.

Tours are good for novice world travelers too, Kalvinskas says. They should think about subjects of interest--Navajo weaving, Sumerian archeology, Himalayan snow leopards--and then find an association that sponsors trips that explore them. And even tour-takers shouldn’t leave home without a good guidebook, she says, because human guides don’t know everything and you’ll always have free time to fill.

Do-it-yourself planners spend a great deal of time on the next step in trip planning: researching destinations. This means approaches as diverse as taking up meditation if you’re going to India, cribbing ideas from tour company brochures and burying your head in guidebooks. Kalvinskas gets inspiration about what to do and see from lushly photographed books in the Insight, Fodor’s Exploring, Knopf and Eyewitness series, then zeroes in with Frommer’s, Best Places and Lonely Planet guides when deciding on such details as hotels.

Research also is paramount for Rob Sangster, author of “Traveler’s Tool Kit” (Menasha Ridge Press, 1996). He focuses on the literature and culture of his destination and pays less attention to specifics such as lodgings because they can be worked out on the spot. He learns all he can about events--festivals, markets, the theater season--and transportation so he can plan his trips accordingly. “There’s a little boat that goes across Lake Titicaca between Bolivia and Peru, but it only makes the trip once a week,” Sangster says. “If you learn these things you get to do all the great things in the world.”

Once you’re feeling reasonably knowledgeable about your destination, the next stage is making a calendar. Travel pros do this because it allows them to think visually by blocking out days for each stop. Remember that you won’t get much sightseeing done on travel days and that you should give yourself extra time to recuperate if you’re prone to jet lag. Don’t book tight connections either; it’s easier on your nerves.

You begin to lock in your calendar by buying transportation, which usually means buying a plane ticket. I routinely spend at least a day calling airlines, travel agents and consolidators, comparing prices and schedules, but when it comes time to pay for the ticket, I’m as nervous as a runner before a race. What happens if I buy a nonrefundable plane ticket but can’t get hotel reservations? Sandra Gustafson, author of the “Great Sleeps” and “Great Eats” guidebook series, published by Chronicle Books, says not to worry. “See about the flight first, then book accommodations,” she told me recently. “There are a lot more of them than there are flights.”

Next I start booking special tours and expeditions that require reservations and must be done at a certain time. For instance, the royal palace in Brussels is open for tours only briefly in the summer. To see Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu, N.M., you must reserve well in advance.

At the same time, I work on accommodations, usually by fax or Internet. This yields printed confirmations, which can be valuable if a hotel loses your reservation. Sometimes I don’t bother booking hotels in advance, particularly if I’m going to a place with lots of choices. It can be fun to find little pearls that aren’t in the guidebooks, and, as Gustafson says, you sometimes get the best deals on the spot, asking for a room for that night and promising to pay in cash.

But Gustafson never wings it when she arrives at her destination. “I’m tired, and I want to know where I’m going to sleep the first night,” she says.

Gradually the calendar fills and evolves into an itinerary, which I distribute to colleagues, family and friends. I take several copies on the trip, secreted in my purse, carry-on bag and checked luggage, to make sure I never lose it. Another copy is ceremoniously placed in a burgeoning file folder at home.

Itineraries aren’t just dates, addresses and flight numbers. They’re the tracks we leave across the world, reminding us years later of all the places we’ve been and things we’ve done.