How to plan a multi-city trip in Google Sheets

Travelers view an average of 141 pages of travel content in the 45 days before booking a trip, according to Expedia Group's Path to Purchase research, published 9 January 2024 - and a trip spreadsheet is where most of that research goes to be kept.

Nobody opens a spreadsheet because they love spreadsheets. You open one because the trip has outgrown your head: three cities, two rail legs, a museum that needs timed entry, and a running argument about the budget. A spreadsheet is the honest default for that job, and used well it is a genuinely capable trip planner. Here is the strongest version of the Google Sheets approach we know how to build - the full template, the formulas that do real work, and an equally honest account of where the sheet stops working.

What is the best structure for a trip planning spreadsheet?

One row per itinerary item, one tab for the whole trip. The single worst decision in most trip spreadsheets is a tab per city or a column per day - both make totals nearly impossible and reordering agony. An item is anything with a time or a cost: a train, a museum, a dinner reservation, a hotel night. Give every item its own row and the entire trip becomes sortable, filterable, and summable in one place.

The working columns, left to right:

Add data validation on Type and Booked (Data, then Data validation, then a dropdown from a list) so the columns stay filterable instead of drifting into "yes", "YES", and "done".

Which formulas actually do work in a trip spreadsheet?

Four formulas carry the whole system, and none of them is exotic. Put a small budget block on the right of the sheet or on a second tab:

• Trip total, planned versus actual: =SUM(H2:H100) and =SUM(I2:I100). The gap between those two cells is the most useful number the sheet will ever show you.
• Per-city subtotal: =SUMIF(C:C,"Rome",H:H) - repeat per city. Multi-city trips live and die by knowing which city is eating the budget.
• Per-category subtotal: =SUMIF(E:E,"transit",H:H) - the fastest way to see that transit quietly became a third of the trip.
• Currency conversion: =GOOGLEFINANCE("CURRENCY:EURUSD") in one cell, then multiply planned costs by that cell for a home-currency view. The rate updates itself, which is one chore the sheet does remove.

The Booked column deserves conditional formatting: Format, then Conditional formatting, rule "text is exactly no", fill red. A trip spreadsheet with a wall of red Booked cells three weeks out is telling you something no app notification can say as loudly.

How do you keep bookings from slipping through the sheet?

Sort by the Book by column once a week and work the list top to bottom. Timed-entry sights and reservation-compulsory trains are the two categories that punish lateness: popular museums release timed slots weeks ahead and sell out, and advance train fares climb as the cheap buckets empty. When you enter any item, ask one question - "can I book this now, and if not, when must I" - and write the date in Book by even when the answer is "on arrival". A cell that says "n-a" is a decision; an empty cell is a landmine.

How do you plan a trip with other people in one sheet?

Share the file with edit access for the people actually planning and view access for everyone else, and agree on one rule: the sheet is the record, the chat is the argument. Google Sheets handles simultaneous editing up to 100 people, so the mechanics are never the problem. The problem is that the chat is where decisions actually happen, and a sheet cell that changes from "Uffizi" to "Accademia" carries no memory of why, who pushed for it, or what it displaced. Expect to re-litigate. Write contested decisions into the Notes column with a date; future-you will thank present-you at least twice.

Can you use the trip spreadsheet offline while traveling?

Yes, with preparation that must happen before you lose signal. On a laptop, offline editing needs Chrome or Edge with the Google Docs Offline extension enabled, switched on in Drive settings and per file. On phones, open the Sheets app, find the file, and mark it available offline in advance - each device separately. Do the offline setup at home the day you finish planning, not on airport wifi, and test it in airplane mode for thirty seconds. A trip plan that lives behind a signal is a plan that fails in tunnels, planes, and the exact rural valley where you needed the confirmation code in the Notes column.

If this is the kind of logistics you would rather not run by hand: 7 Wanders builds the whole day-by-day plan from one description of the trip, and researches the real trains and flights instead of inventing them.

Where does the spreadsheet genuinely win?

A concession first: for a two-person weekend trip - one city, one hotel, no rail legs - the spreadsheet, or honestly a shared note, beats every app we know of, including ours. Zero setup beyond ten minutes, free forever, infinitely flexible, and nothing to learn. Sheets also stays unbeatable at custom arithmetic no app anticipates: loyalty-point valuations, a four-person settle-up matrix, a packing weight budget. If your trips are simple and your changes are few, the honest advice is to copy the template above and stop reading.

Where does the spreadsheet stop working?

The break point is change, and multi-city trips generate change constantly. We counted the touches on our own template: moving one day of a 12-day, four-city plan - say rain washes out the Wednesday hike - means re-dating every later row by hand, re-checking two timed bookings against their new day, eyeballing whether the Thursday train still makes sense, and trusting every traveler to re-read the sheet. Nineteen cell edits, by our count, for one rained-out afternoon, every one of them yours to remember. The sheet also cannot tell you whether the morning train you typed into a cell exists - transit research stays your job, done tab by tab, pasted by hand, aging silently from the moment you paste it. A spreadsheet is a ledger of decisions; it has no opinion about whether the decisions still fit the world.

The copy-paste starter

Paste row one into a fresh sheet and you have the template:

Date | Day | City | Item | Type | Booked | Book by | Planned | Actual | Notes

Then: data validation dropdowns on Type (transit, stay, food, sight) and Booked (yes, no, n-a); conditional formatting red on Booked = "no"; the four formulas from above in a budget block; one GOOGLEFINANCE cell if you travel across currencies. Freeze row one (View, then Freeze). Total setup is fifteen minutes, and the file is reusable for every trip after this one - duplicate, clear the rows, keep the formulas.

The bottom line

Google Sheets is a genuinely good trip planner while the trip holds still, and this template is the strongest version of it we know how to build. The row-per-item structure, the SUMIF budget block, and the book-by column will carry a two-city trip without complaint. The sheet's weakness is change - weather, strikes, a group that rebooks - because every change is hand-propagation, and mid-trip you are the sync engine. Use the sheet until the moving parts outnumber your patience, and know that the break point is real.