Top 6 FREE Trip Planning Google Sheets Templates (+How to create One)

Sometimes, you may feel like a trip is all you need.

But know that planning a perfect trip is challenging. From booking flight tickets to organizing accommodations, the process is both time-consuming and daunting.

A Google spreadsheet can help you streamline the entire trip planning process. It is one of the top tools used by frequent travelers to stay organized and stress-free. Whether you are off on a solo trip, planning a family vacation, or organizing a getaway with your friends, Google Sheets trip planning templates can be your savior.

In this article, let us discuss the top 6 FREE Trip Planning Google Sheets Templates. We will also learn the steps to create one from scratch. So, get ready to discover the ultimate travel planning tool that will turn your dream trip into reality.

Why is a Trip Planning Template created using Google Sheets a must-try?

Google Sheets is one of the top spreadsheet applications used to organize and analyze massive datasets.

Here are some benefits of using Google Sheets to plan your trip:

Team Collaboration – Google Sheets can be shared with unlimited users. You can share your trip plan with your friends and family to allow them to make necessary adjustments as needed. All the changes made by the shared users are saved and can be accessed through the Version History tool of Google Sheets.
Ease of Use – The program boasts an easy-to-use and intuitive user interface for beginners. Anyone new to Google Sheets may hardly require a few minutes to learn the program. All of the essential tools and functions are accessible right from the main menu and toolbar section of Google Sheets.
Accessibility – As a traveler, you may not always have access to your laptop. Google Sheets is a cloud-based spreadsheet program that is compatible with nearly all types of devices, including desktops, laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. You can view and edit Google spreadsheets as long as there is an active internet connection.
Budget-friendly – Google Sheets is free to use, making it a budget-friendly option for travelers. All of the tools, functions, and even graphs are accessible to free-plan users without any limitations.
Extensive Customization – You can customize Google Sheets templates as per your needs. There are hundreds of tools, including a range of formatting options that let you change the font style and cell background color, insert images, and much more.

Overall, Google Sheets boasts a vast number of tools and functions in their free plan to let users streamline the trip planning process and make the most out of it.

Top 6 FREE Trip Planning Google Sheets Templates

Planning a trip is a daunting task without proper tools at your disposal.

You will find a lot of apps and third-party tools to organize your trip. But all of them come with a price tag that adds up to your trip budget.

In the following section, we have compiled a list of the best free-to-use Google Sheets trip planning templates for 2024.

#1 – Business Trip Itinerary Template by SoftwareAccountant

Download FREE Trip Planning Google Sheets Template [SoftwareAccountant]

Click Here To Use This Template!

This simple itinerary template is the best fit for business trips.

You can customize it for free as per your business trip requirements. The template comes with different sections to include various aspects of traveling, such as transportation, lodging, meetings, and any other travel details that you wish to track.

Make sure to include hyperlinks for places like hotels and restaurants to maintain a record of online resources during your travel.

It’s a straightforward template without any fancy formulas to help you keep track of your itinerary.

Feel free to add more details by inserting rows and columns to your trip planning template if required.

You can even play around with the colors to make it more attractive.

#2 – Blue Business Itinerary Template by GooDocs

Click Here To Use This Template!

Another easy-to-use Google Sheets trip planner to stay organized during your business trips.

You need to enter the trip details, such as flight information, accommodation details, and a daily schedule, into different tables.

The daily schedule section allows you to plan your activities for each day during your trip. You can include meetings, appointments, social events, and much more. This ensures that you don’t miss any necessary appointments and meetings and that you make the most of your time during the business trip.

Download this template now and start filling in the blanks with your trip details.

You can fully customize the template to your specific taste by changing the font styles, adjusting the cell background colors, adding more rows or columns, and much more.

#3 – Travel Itinerary Template by Johnnyafrica.com

Click Here To Use This Template!

Are you looking for an all-in-one Google spreadsheet to plan your trip?

Look no further; this travel itinerary template is a very comprehensive tool for planning and organizing a trip.

It is divided into multiple sheets to cover various aspects of travel planning, such as flight, lodging, and car rental details.

Let us have a quick look at each sheet of the template:

The “Flight details” sheet allows you to input the details of your flights, such as the journey dates, destinations, time, cost per person, etc.
The “Lodging details” sheet allows you to list hotel reservations, contact details, and lodging costs, as well as check-in and check-out times.
The “Car Rental details” sheet has different fields or sections for organizing information related to renting a car for your trip. This sheet includes fields like the Rental Company name, status, pick-up and drop-off locations, rental costs, etc.

You can make a copy of it and customize the template to streamline your travel planning process.

#4 – Travel Info Sheet by Lifehacker

Click Here To Use This Template!

This Travel info sheet by Lifehacker lets you stay organized by keeping all the information in one place. It comes with various sheets to keep track of the flight details, transportation, on-site schedule, contact details, packing list, etc.

What makes this template different from the above ones is that you can even ensure the care and maintenance of your home while you are away. You can achieve this by filling in the fields in the pets and utility numbers section in the “Home Care” sheet.

It also has a “Summary” sheet where you can get a brief overview of the travel plan. Note that the sheet is fully automated; it uses formulas to retrieve information from the other sheets.

Avoid editing the cells containing the formula; otherwise, the template won’t work as expected.

#5 – Vacation Itinerary Planning Template by Smartsheet

Click Here To Use This Template!

With this Vacation Itinerary Planning template, you can plan a three-day trip. It comes with three different sheets to manage those days.

You can make and record plans for each day of your trip, including restaurant reservations, transportation, accommodation, and even entertainment ideas.

You can keep a timely track of your activities so that you make the most of your trip.

Make sure to duplicate one of the three sheets if your trip is longer than 3-days. You can easily do that by right-clicking the sheet name at the bottom of the screen and then choosing the “Duplicate” option from the popup.

The template also allows you to record the contact details of various individuals and services, ensuring you have easy access to essential contacts while traveling.

#6 – Travel Itinerary Template by GooDocs

Click Here To Use This Template!

Last but not least, this template is available for free. It comes with an attractive design and can be used for long vacations.

Note that the template focuses on creating a list of things that need to be packed for the trip and also the activities that can be enjoyed during the trip.

By default, the template allows you to plan a two-day trip using the sections provided, but you can add more days if needed. It uses checkboxes to make sure you pack everything that’s needed during your vacation.

The template is pretty straightforward. You can customize it very easily using the formatting options available in Google Sheets. Make sure to change the font style and cell background colors, adjust the header, include your personal or company logo, etc.

How to Create a Trip Planning Google Sheets Template

As mentioned earlier, Google Sheets is one of the top beginner-friendly spreadsheet software. It has a very short learning curve.

Creating a trip-planning template from scratch is a breeze. You need to explore built-in tools in Google Sheets. It may hardly take a few minutes.

Take a look at the following screenshot.

Let us recreate the above template in the following section.

STEP #1 – Creating a Header

You may share your trip plan with friends and family. A header is used to convey the purpose of the shared template instantly.

In the case of business trip planning, the header is a crucial element of the overall design.

Here are the steps to create a header:

Open a new Google Sheet by clicking here
Select the entire first row
Increase the height as per your preference
Select all the cells from “A1” to “K1“
Click on the “Merge cells” icon from the toolbar section
Type “SMALL BUSINESS TRIP ITINERARY TEMPLATE“
Increase the font size to 23
Change the font type to “Lexend“
Make the font bold
Change the cell background color to dark blue (Hex Code – #001149)
Change the font color to white

With the above steps, the header should look as follows,

STEP #2 – Add the Company Name and Trip Details

It’s essential to include the company name and trip details in the Business Trip Itinerary Template.

Anyone from the HR or accounting team may open the template or trip planning document in the future, and these details will quickly convey the purpose of the journey along with the start and end dates.

Let’s get them added through the following steps,

Select the cells “B2” and “C2”
Merge them as shown in the previous step
Now type “Company Name“
Change the font style to “Lexend“
Adjust the font size to 16
Change the text color to dark blue (Hex Code – #001149)

The template now looks like,

To add the trip details,

Select the cell “D2”
Type in “Purpose“
Make the font bold
Change the cell background color to dark blue (Hex Code – #001149)
Change the font color to white
Enter the remaining fields as shown below,

Now, let’s move to adding itineraries.

STEP #3 – Add the Itineraries or Travel Plans

Let’s make sure we make a structured plan for activities and destinations.

A well-organized and successful trip is possible only when we properly list and plan each aspect of the journey. We need to consider itinerary details like Departing Flights, Car Rentals, Meetings and Events, etc.

In this step, we will learn how to add a different table for each of the aspects as mentioned above.

Let’s begin,

Select all the cells from “B7” to “K7“
Click on the “Merge cells” icon from the toolbar section
Type in “Departing Flight“
Make the font bold
Change the font color to dark blue (Hex Code – #001149)
Adjust the alignment to the middle
Change the background color to dark gray
Adjust the font size to 10

The template would look like,

To add the details of each itinerary,

Select the cell “B8”
Type “Date“
Adjust the font size to 10
Change the font style to “Lexend“
Change the font color to dark blue (Hex Code – #001149)
Change the background color to light gray

Similarly, enter the remaining fields: Depart-location, Depart-time, Airline, Reference number, Flight number, Location, Arrival time, and More info.

To add borders in the toolbar, click on the “Borders” icon in the toolbar and choose from the types of borders you wish to apply.

In the same way, insert the remaining sections as shown below,

STEP #4 – Adding A Calendar Popup

Let us make sure that whenever we need to enter the date in the given cell, a calendar popup appears from where we can pick up the date.

The calendar popup functionality is built-in Google Sheets.

Here’s how to add it,

To enable the calendar popup for the start and end date, select the cells “K4” and “K5”
Hover to the main menu
Click on the “Data” tab
Choose the “Data Validation” option from the popup
A pop dialog box will appear on the left side of the screen
Next, click on the “Add Rule” button as shown above
Click on the “Criteria” dropdown
Choose the “Is valid date” option from the list

That’s it. You can now check for the calendar popup in the specified cells by clicking on them, as shown in the GIF below.

Similarly, make sure to add the calendar popup to the columns of the trip details table.

Let’s validate the time fields now. First, let’s work on the Depart-time field.

Select the “D9” to “D12”
Hover to the main menu
Click on the “Format” tab
Choose the “Number” option from the popup
Select the “Time” format as shown in the following image,

Now, when you enter the time, Google Sheets will convert that data into the default time format.

STEP #5 – Formatting

You can format the template as you wish by changing the text styles, adjusting the background colors, and much more.

All of the formatting options are available in the toolbar section below the main menu.

Here’s a snapshot of the template we created. It is the same template we created using the above steps. The only difference is that we used our Google Sheets knowledge and expertise to take the aesthetics to the next level.

You can download the above template we created using the following link.

Click Here To Make A Copy!

To Summarize: Trip Planning Google Sheets Template

If you are new to Google Sheets or in a hurry, then we suggest choosing one of the free trip-planning templates discussed at the beginning of the article.

Whether you are a travel company or going on a family vacation or a business trip, these templates have you covered. These are like ready-made maps that help you organize everything easily, from where you are staying to what you are doing each day.

However, none of the templates are the right fit for your specific requirements, so follow the steps discussed above to create a template from scratch.

Make sure to drop a comment if you need any further assistance or are stuck somewhere while using the above templates.

For more such templates to improve your daily routine and make the most out of your day, please refer to our blog page.