How to check a travel itinerary for gaps before you go
Most itinerary mistakes are not wrong bookings but missing ones: a night between two hotels that nobody booked, a transfer between cities that was assumed rather than arranged, or a connection that looked fine on paper and is too short in practice.
They are easy to miss because each booking is correct on its own. A gap only appears when the whole trip is laid out in order, night by night and journey by journey.
Lay the trip out in order
Start where the trip begins and finish where it ends. Put every stay, with its check-in and check-out dates, and every journey, with its departure and arrival times, into one sequence. Confirmation emails arrive in the order things were booked, not the order they happen, which is why gaps hide in an inbox.
What to check
With the trip in order, look for each of these:
- A night with nowhere to sleep: one stay checks out before the next one checks in.
- Two stays on the same night: the next check-in comes before the last check-out, so a night is paid for twice.
- A stay that starts before the trip begins or ends after it finishes, which is usually a booking made for the wrong dates.
- Two stays in a row in different places with no journey booked between them.
- No journey booked to reach the first place you stay.
- No journey booked onward from the last place you stay.
- No journey booked to the place the trip ends, which is usually home.
- No starting point recorded, so the first and last journeys have nothing to be checked against.
- A connection shorter than 90 minutes between flights, or 30 minutes between trains, buses and other journeys over land or sea.
Check the documents as well
A passport that expires during the trip, or too soon after it, is the one gap no booking can fix at the airport. The guide to passport validity covers what to look up.
Let the planner do the checking
The planner runs every check above each time the trip changes, and shows anything that needs attention against the day it falls on. Trips stay in your browser, and no account is needed.
The planner checks a trip as you build it, in your browser, with no account.
Start Your Journey