Turn Saved Places Into a Trip Itinerary

Three days in Lisbon, and forty-odd saved places. A pastelaria your sister sent in February. Two viewpoints. A record shop. Four restaurants, one of which you can no longer remember why you saved.

None of it is in any order. That's the whole problem.

The blank page is the wrong place to start

Open almost any itinerary tool and it asks the same opening question: where are you going? Then it hands you a city and an empty grid and expects you to research it from scratch — top ten this, must-see that, a list assembled for nobody in particular.

But you're not starting from nothing. You've been collecting this city for months, in ones and twos, every time somebody mentioned something or you saw a photo you liked. That pile is better than any list a stranger could write for you, because every single entry got there for a reason.

It just isn't a plan yet. A pile and a plan are different objects, and turning one into the other takes about twenty minutes and four decisions.

First, read the pile

Before you sort anything, look at what's actually in there. Not to organise it — just to see it.

Three groups usually appear without you trying:

• The reasons you're going. Two or three places the trip is arguably built around.
• The maybes. Interesting, saved on a whim, no strong feeling either way.
• The strays. Something you saved for a different city entirely. A place that has since closed. One you genuinely cannot place.

Delete the strays now. It takes a minute and makes everything after it easier. You'll also find a few saves you know a friend told you about but can't remember which friend or why — that's a different problem, and it's worth fixing at the source rather than at the sorting stage.

Group by neighbourhood, not by day

Here's the mistake nearly everyone makes: they open the calendar first. Day one, day two, day three. Then they fill each day with things they'd like to do, and end up with a Tuesday that crosses the city four times.

Do the geography first and the days fall out of it on their own.

Put your saved places on a map and look for clumps. Not routes — clumps. Most cities give you three or four, and most piles cluster harder than you'd expect, because you saved them from the same articles and the same friends who all like the same part of town.

A clump with five or six places in it is a day. A clump with one place in it is either a problem to solve later or a place to cut.

Give each day one anchor

Every day needs exactly one thing that is fixed. Everything else moves around it.

An anchor is whatever has a time attached to it: the museum that shuts at five, the restaurant that only takes bookings at eight, the market that's dead after eleven in the morning. Pick it, book it, build outwards.

One anchor per day. Two anchors is a schedule, and schedules on holiday make people miserable.

Pace it honestly

The tempting version of a day has six things in it. The version that works has three, plus whatever you stumble into.

A shape that holds up:

• Morning — one thing, unhurried. Coffee somewhere specific, then the market or the walk.
• Midday — the anchor, or lunch near it.
• Afternoon — one thing, or nothing at all. This is the slot that absorbs the day running long, and the day always runs long.
• Evening — dinner, plus whatever comes after it.

Walking between stops inside one neighbourhood is ten or fifteen minutes. Between neighbourhoods it's forty, and forty-minute transfers are where days die. If a day needs two of them, it's two days.

If your evening ends up as three or four small stops in one area rather than one long dinner, you've built a food crawl — which is a good way to spend an evening in a city you don't know, because a single dud stop costs you far less.

The cutting

This is the part nobody enjoys and everybody needs.

Three days is roughly nine slots. If you've grouped and paced honestly, you have twelve to fifteen candidates for those nine. Something has to go.

Cut in this order:

1. The orphans. Anything not in a clump. A brilliant place forty minutes out of the way costs you half a day.
2. The duplicates of a type. Four coffee places is one coffee place and three regrets.
3. The ones you can't defend. If you can't say in one sentence why it's on the list, it isn't on the list.
4. The ones needing a booking you haven't made. Not tragic. They go on the list for next time rather than off it entirely.

What's left will feel too short, and then feel about right on day two.

Where the itinerary should live

Not in your notes app, and definitely not in the group chat, where it scrolls away and you spend Thursday answering "what time again?" for the fourth time.

A plan has to be one thing everyone can open. In Blinko, a plan is built out of spots you've already saved — you pull a few into an order, put a time on it, and invite whoever's coming. People who don't use Blinko open the link in a browser and RSVP from there. Times show in each person's own zone, which stops being a novelty the second somebody is flying in from another one.

A plan also carries tasks with an owner on each, so "who's bringing the adapter" has a name against it instead of being asked three times. And the conversation about the plan stays attached to the plan, so "can we swap the museum for the market" lands on the thing it's about rather than eighteen messages up a chat.

Afterwards it keeps the note, the photos and the date as a Memory — which is how you end up remembering what you actually did rather than what you meant to do.

Test it on a Saturday before a fortnight

Don't try this out on the big trip. Take one Saturday, in your own city, using places you already saved and never went to.

Group them. Pick the anchor. Cut it to three. Go.

You'll find out very quickly whether the pile you've been building is any good — and that's worth knowing before you get on a plane with it. If it turns out most of what's in there is restaurants you've been carrying for years, that's its own thing to fix.

See how plans work in Blinko →