using a travel book for planning?

We usually make our itinerary first and then get the guide books from the library. We read them, take notes, use a scanner for a few pages. If the book is particularly full of useful information, I'll try to get an e-book to take. We try to skim all the relevant books in our public library and then decide on a few to read in more depth.

It's been a while since I've read it, but my recollection is that Rick himself covers that issue in some detail in his book "Europe Through the Back Door."

Yes, the first step is researching which places you would like to visit and list them. After further research on the sights of interest, determine how many days you would like to stay in each place and add those figures to your list. Then (usually), start crossing places off the list to get yourself down to the number of days you'll have for your trip!

Happy planning.

Have you decided on what country or countries to visit? If not, buy Rick Steves' Europe through the Back Door 38th edition. You can buy an electronic version from his app. If you know what countries you want to visit, go to Rick Steves’ website and click on Explore Europe > select the country you’re interested in > click on the + sign on the same line as At a Glance. I would concentrate on the places that show three triangles that point upward and work my way down the list as priorities of sights to see. For example, If you click on Denmark it shows Copenhagen listed first then Ærø, etc. meaning you want to begin in Copenhagen.

Definitely get the RS EUROPE THROUGH THE BACK DOOR - it's sometimes cheaper on Amazon. You'll learn a lot on how to use a CreditCard over there, how to get Euros out of an ATM with a Debit Card. it teaches you how to take the train. And the last section of the book goes over all the countries. I still usually get a travel book too. Also, download the RS app before you go over and there are FREE walking tours and tours of cathedrals, etc.

Hi John,

First we pick the one country or two adjacent countries for an itinerary. If my husband is going with me, we’ll talk about any major locations that are a priority for either of us.

The following can go through several cycles - After looking on-line mostly but also reading that country’s RS guidebook (specifically the first few pages of all locations), I’ll write possible cities on a large piece of paper, placed approximately where they would be on a map. Then I draw lines between locations. I look up all of the train times and mark those on each line. At this point, if something is very difficult to reach, it’s crossed off the map.

The time-consuming part (which I don’t mind) is that I look up every town that’s in the vicinity of the possible route. It’s pretty easy to just pull up images on-line and also top sites to give it a quick “possibly” or “nope” on the options. One that quickly comes to mind from my 2019 France trip was adding Le Mans. I was planning already to go to Chartres & Tours. I stayed overnight in the medieval portion of Le Mans and very glad to experience it. This also gives great ideas for daytrips, i.e. Menton while I was in Nice. I love to have a few places off of the typical tourist (and guidebooks) list.

From there, I’ll sketch out an itinerary, and at this point I read the details of any locations in the RS guidebook, plus lots of on-line details to determine what I would do at each location and approximate number of nights. There’s some give & take as more details are discovered, and some towns may be dropped or added. For instance, Simon in our forum recommended seeing Angers Fortress in some discussions of the chateau area, so I dropped a night off Tours to be able to stay overnight at Angers - loved it! Also, checking which day museums, etc. are open can shift the itinerary dates.

And lastly, although it’s one of my initial searches now, we love attending any local festivals! I shifted dates up for my Italy solo retirement trip to attend the Stresa Music Festival, the opera at the Verona Roman Arena, and the Jousting Festival in Arezzo. Those memories are priceless!

I’ve also created an entire itinerary, but then it just didn’t feel right. For instance, I planned the whole itinerary for a trip to Spain one year. After a month, I stored that one away, and began again with a different country. A year later, we were excited to go to Spain, and we used the original plan with just a few tweaks, adding a couple more nights.

I create/maintain my trip itinerary in OneNote, which I can access from my phone or laptop. Within that itinerary, I put references to pages in my RS (or other) guidebooks and a few notes. I then (carefully) remove key sections from the RS guidebooks and take those with me: self-guided walks, some restaurant listings or details of sights. I tote them home again: haven't had the heart to toss them along the way.

Your 1 > 4 strategy is a good starting point.

A couple of other concerns:

• Rick himself will tell you that his books are not comprehensive and tend to focus on his personal favorites. Consult other travel guides as well.

• Your chosen places of interest may be end up requiring excessive travel for your time/budget. Keep in mind that what interests you is theoretical - you haven't been there yet. You may want to yield one or more places for the sake of a more streamlined trip, perhaps visiting a certain sector of the country or staying within a certain travel radius - and either see some of your second-string choices, or leave some time for a random and adventurous outing or two... perhaps your innkeeper will steer you to a local festival or nearby scenic spot you never read about in a guidebook. "Travel less, see more" is not oxymoronic.

• And with that in mind, it needn't be "France OR Germany"... if for example you decide the Black Forest is for you, it's easy to include the French Alsace just across the border; similarly, a visit to Munich should not mean that Salzburg, Austria (less than 2 hours from Munich) is out of the question.

• How you plan to travel (car? train?) matters too. If you don't want to drive, certain choices may not be easily accessible. In Germany, where train service takes you almost everywhere, this is less an issue than in a country like France. It's also true that major cities can often be hellish places to use/keep a car. For a German itinerary like Cologne/Rhine Valley > Berlin > Munich > Salzburg, I would opt for the train, without question. But if I were dead-set on driving, I suppose if I were willing to forego Berlin, I could manage that route with a car if I stayed somewhere outside Munich (and used public transport to commute into the city for sightseeing.)

Most travel guidebooks, including Rick Steves, Lonely Planet, Frommers, Rough Guide, etc., list sample itineraries to get you started on possible ways to narrow down the cities included in their book. Some say “If you have 5 days, go here and here, if you have 7, add this place, for 2 weeks, include this place too.” Some have suggestions if you’re interested in hiking and walking destinations, other places for relaxing on beaches, and different targets for history or art. You can even get a Top 10 list of highlights.

Rick’s guidebooks tend to focus on a “Best Of” list of places in a country. Lonely Planet books often list many more locations, usually categorized by a particular region within a country, so more of those often need to be eliminated, but read thru the places to pick which to skip and which to see. Determine how much time you have for your trip, and a good guidebook will help determine how much you can fit into that time. That will greatly help cut places to what’s doable on your timeframe. You can ignore some chapters, and see them on a future trip.

In addition to listing top cities, Rick also lists top sights in that city, further determining where to best spend your time. It’s like when you go to a restaurant - there are so many items on the menu, but you’re not expected to order every dish. Pick a few items, depending on your appetite, your budget, and what sounds interesting and good. Like a menu or waiter can list ingredients and suggestions, a guidebook will break destinations into chapters to aid your decisions.

Also, some people want to fit in as many places as they can in their trip, but that means being on the move, and seeing and experiencing more sites, but less thoroughly each place. Going to fewer cities, but spending more time each place, gives a more in-depth opportunity, especially for bigger cities.

In addition to the front of guidebooks having ways to narrow down the many cities, the back portion of a guidebook generally has helpful details to make a trip smoother, to pack, prepare, and get more from the visit.

I tend to know where, broadly, I want visit before getting a book. To decide on a country or region I will look online, watch tv travel shows, browse books in the library, look at pictures, talk to people I know and then decide on a place. I’ll then buy a book or three on that place.

If it’s a region the book can help me decide which towns to see. In that case, where I need to narrow down which hill towns to go to or something, I’ll read each section to see where my interest lies. Otherwise I’ll just read the sections on my destinations and maybe skim the others just in case it changes my mind.

Then I’ll read the listings in the book. Skimming ones I care less about (shopping, because it’s not my travel focus, nightlife if I’m traveling with my children). I especially focus on things to see, since that’s the core of a trip to me. I will also supplement with internet sources. First to confirm things like hours and ticket requirements - I bet this will be even more important post COVID! Also to find other options. For me this especially applies to restaurants. There are so many and often the places I like best are not the more traditional things favored by many guidebooks. So I dig into food blogs and online sources. In general if you have a particular special interest a guidebook might not hit it so supplement with online sources.

Also I read the logistic sections closely shortly before I go. Things like how the subway works, etiquette, language phrases. That’s just very helpful if not super exciting.

But my most important tip is to MAP everything you are interested in, from the book, online, personal recommendations, everything. There are apps that let you put marks on your own places of interest on a city/country/world map, often you can color code to distinguish categories like restaurants/stores/museums. You save the map and can access it, add to it, whenever including when on your trip.

So the whole procedure can be reduced to read the book, come across a place of interest, confirm details online, put it on your personalized map.

Why is the map my #1 tip? It makes it so easy to plan and yet be flexible. You can see that museum A is a block from church B and a 3 minute walk from restaurant C, which is just off piazza D. There, you have a great, easy, logical day! And say you aren’t hungry so skip restaurant C and go walking in a random direction. Great, you walk for half an hour and are now hungry. Open the map, you happen to be near restaurant E and go there. Then you see you are only a block from a park you marked as having great gardens so off you go and so forth.

John, skimming your background posts, it's obvious that you're no stranger to Europe! Looks like you've traveled both independently - including driving in France - and with RS tours? So I'm curious if your current method of planning is not working for you, thus your question? Is the 1-4 method mentioned in your post the way you've been planning your independent travel so far?

I like to combine Rick Steves' audio apps with the info in the book on self-guided tours. For example, we walked around Pompeii independently and the map given to us at the tour desk was too complicated to decipher. I turned into the guide for our group of four using the torn out pages from the book. I don't carry the whole book- just the torn-out sections.

We normally have a general idea of the area we want to visit. Usually it’s only an area of a country not an entire country. We’ll then look at some travel books to get additional ideas on places to stop. Once we have a fairly firm itinerary I’ll look at the towns along the route we plan to take (normally have a rental car) and research them on the web and TripAdvisor. Many small towns have sites worthy of stopping at. Next is determining how many nights we’ll stay in one place. From those places I’ll research other small towns we can make day trips to. Many of the smaller towns don’t take long to see, so a few towns and sights can be visited in a day. Finally, if I know we’ll be traveling someplace and I hear of interesting places to visit via friends or television, I’ll bookmark them on Google maps so if we’re in the area, we can incorporate them into the trip. We keep daily driving to 2 hours or less per day.

A lot of people miss this useful planning guide, here on this website, under the Explore Europe tab: planning by country It breaks things down by country and major cities, and in many cases, advice by how many days you have. Its not comprehensive or much different than the books, but if you want a shortcut, it helps.

I like reading guidebooks, cover to cover, and I put together an itinerary based on how I can link interesting places efficiently (by rail) if thats how I'm getting around. Other choices have been made from TV shows and if the places shown capture your imagination. If you trust RS's choices and its a first-time visit to a country, its pretty easy to just go with his recommendations. More experience in a destination, of course you seek out the less well-known.

My children quite rightly make fun of my mixture of technology and, uh, paper/scissors/tape in my use of guide books. I get all the guide books out of the library, put a post-it note on every page I am interested in, and then photograph each of those pages with my phone. I realize I could just leave it at that.

But I like to print up each one of these "photographs," and then cut out the exact parts I want. Sort of a craft project. I have also printed up screenshots from websites and blogs and Google Images, and cut out the relevant parts of those, too. Then I organize the scraps of paper by town or area or subject and tape the scraps in some kind of order onto full-size pieces of paper labeled "Venice churches" or "Rome Places to Eat" or whatever. Then I photograph each of those papers with my phone and add large red semi-transparent labels that I can see on my phone without enlarging the photo.

Works for me, not many people's cup of tea.

Many Lonely Planet guides, e-book/kindle editions, are free on Amazon Unlimited. Amazon Unlimited offers a free 30 day trial and then is $10 for a month if you stay subscribed. You don't own or keep the books but you can save your notes, highlighted text, and way more pages than I have ever needed. I have found this a good way to explore and narrow down possibilities, especially if I am considering more than one country, and to browse books for single cities as well as a country or a region. I do not use Amazon Unlimited for anything else and I am not trying to promote it.

In earlier times, I used to enjoy a ritual of spending time in local brick and mortar bookstores with well stocked travel sections, but few bookstores remain and those that still exist don't have the extensive travel sections I once enjoyed. I now appreciate the convenience of electronic guide books.

I tend to use Rick’s RV shows, along with internet research to give me ideas of which towns/regions I want to visit. I then calculate travel times (rome2rio and Google maps) to figure out a good route/itinerary (when possible using an open jaw/multi city flight to reduce backtracking). I’ve found that most of the suggested itineraries guidebooks give are a little ambitious for my taste. As a rule of thumb, I like to have at least three nights in one spot and more for big cities.

Then, I use the guidebooks more for specifics - tips on booking reservations at museums in certain cities, restaurants, etc.). I have found it helpful to get both the country book and the city guide for the biggest city (eg - Italy book and Rome book) as the city guides have a lot more detail.

I took 4 solo trips to Europe so far. My approximate method of planning my trips was: pick a country I think seems appealing, or 2 adjacent countries if the countries are small enough. Read Wikipedia articles. I keep myself open to unlearning anything from Wikipedia if later other sources say it is wrong. I looked for which countries seem safe enough, have good museums and/or monuments, are easy enough to see alone. I like art museums, castles, not so much churches, but I may go to one or more briefly anyway. More than half a year in advance I bought guidebooks. At first I liked Rick Steves the best because he described the transportation the best. Then I started realizing that the Rough Guides are almost as good, or better for some cities. I read guide cbook's cover to cover or scan for which towns have appealing sites. For my last 3 trips to Europe I got sophisticated and typed myself day-by-day itineraries, while looking through guidebooks, with frequent deviations to look at websites like Google maps, rome2rio, descriptions of sites, searching for train and bus schedules, and so on. It can be hard to acquiesce to skipping appealing museums or sites or towns. Sometimes I write "see [name of a place] or [name of another place]" or "if time [place that looks appealing that is not the most important thing to see that day that i don't know whether i will have time for or whether i will be awake enough for]. After I wrote my itineraries, I ended up rewriting them one or more times. After settling on which cities to see and which to skip, I buy plane tickets after searching for plane tickets on multiple evenings for 2 weeks or more.

It is possible not every decision is rational. Maybe I am a like a genius on figuring out how to plan trips. I look at maps while trying to mentally plot out an itinerary in terms of which order to see which cities. I book hotels before reservations for trains or buses.

@Kathy writes: John, skimming your background posts, it's obvious that you're no stranger to Europe! Looks like you've traveled both independently - including driving in France - and with RS tours? So I'm curious if your current method of planning is not working for you, thus your question?

Well, you're right. I've travelled a bit, but with this being a year where I'm not anticipating any trips I've been re-thinking what I've been doing and wondering if there's a better way.

And as a bit of a confession, in the past I have felt a bit overwhelmed at times by the planning which made the RS tour an easy alternative. Add a few days on our own at the start or end, the rest of the trip was planned by the good folks at RS. But having recently retired I have both more time to plan and fewer dollars to spend. So asking what others do (colloquially termed "best practices" in my former work) seems to be timely.

I think the first guide book I ever bought was RS Trhough the Back Door - back in the 80s - but I've used Lonely Planet all over the world - most recently in China in 2019. Just got the 2019 Eastern Europe out of the library - and it has the great format of
* suggesting itineraries through the whole of eastern Europe (and their definition makes far more sense than Steves - basically everything that was once behind the iron curtain)
* for each country they then have highlights and suggested shorter itineraries ie 4 days/ 1 week

Id therefore suggest looking for either Lonely Planets WEstern Europe guide or their individual Germany/Frances guides and work through their suggestions.

I've also quite often looked up tour companies and used their itineraries as a starting point

John, thanks for explaining the reason for your question! I asked mine because, based on your prior posts, it looked to me like you've managed your travels to date very successfully! :O)

I do know what you mean about wading through the many, many details; they can leave me with crossed eyes too. I use a variety of books plus the net, choose the destinations and attractions we're most interested in, mark them in the book I'll be taking + on a separate fold-out map (to group them by area), and then make an itinerary. Other than attractions which have advance, timed-entry ticketing - which determines the day/time we must visit - I build in some flex time for unexpected surprises, both welcome and maybe not-so.

As I'm an art/architecture/history geek, destinations of choice tend to be heavy on rich sources of all that.

Rick's website has info about which guidebook is best suited to your needs. I never plan a trip without buying the appropriate guidebbok and tearing out the relevant pages to take with me. His list of "must sees" at the beginning of each book is very helpful in deciding your sightseeing priorities and his detailed transportation information is so helpful.

How you plan to travel (car? train?) matters too. If you don't want to
drive, certain choices may not be easily accessible. In Germany, where
train service takes you almost everywhere, this is less an issue than
in a country like France.

Good advice, but I have a two comments about mode of travel.

Far too often I've seen questions like "We are going to X, looking for advice on places to go to, we will have a car. Or we will travel by train". In my opinion that is a backwards way of planning, I much prefer to first find out where I want to go, then find out what the best way to get there is.

If you rent a car, you don't need to rent it for the entire journey. Rent it for the days you need it, and return it when you are heading to areas where the car is just an expensive headache.

Your question reminded me of a post I wrote about 18 months ago. Here's a link.
https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/trip-reports/a-pre-trip-report-an-anatomy-of-our-planning-for-our-upcoming-trip-to-scotland