How To Make A Visual Trip Itinerary For Your Kids

The exact prompt I asked ChatGPT to use and a template to make your own!

Over the weekend, I put together a visual itinerary for our kids in preparation for our upcoming trip. They’re 5, 7, and 10, and each one processes time a little differently. Our youngest doesn’t quite grasp how long a week is yet and spent much of last year’s trip asking daily, “When are we going home?” Meanwhile, our oldest is a total planner—he wants to know exactly what’s happening every single day.

To help ease some of the questions and give them a clearer picture of the trip ahead, I called in my favorite assistant: ChatGPT.

I already had our full itinerary typed up in the Notes app on my phone—a detailed version just for JD and me, complete with confirmation numbers, reservation details, and links to maps. I dropped that into ChatGPT with this prompt:

“I'm trying to write a short, easy-to-understand calendar/itinerary for our kids for an upcoming trip to Italy and Croatia so they have a general idea of how many days we’ll be gone and what we’re doing each day. Can you help edit/format it?”

And voilà—a few minutes later, ChatGPT gave me a simplified, kid-friendly itinerary. Honestly, is this tool not the greatest invention?

Next, I wanted to turn that itinerary into something visual—a calendar the kids could physically cross off each day to track our progress. So I tried this prompt:

“Can you take the easy-to-read trip list you made and put each day into an actual calendar box?”

That’s where my ChatGPT success hit a little bump. The calendar it created was full of weird typos and some missing info. So I pivoted to trusty old Canva.

I grabbed a blank calendar template and spiced it up a bit, took screenshots of each day’s simplified plan from ChatGPT, and spent about five minutes plugging everything in. Done and done.

I just printed a copy for each kid to tuck into their suitcase. It was so fun to watch their excitement as they read through the plans. I think it’ll be a big help during the trip—giving them something to look forward to, a sense of structure, and a clear idea of when we’re heading home.

Paid subscribers can access a link to the editable calendar below—feel free to make it your own!