Travel Itinerary Template for Google Sheets
Most "travel itinerary template for Google Sheets" links hand you an empty grid and leave the hard part — actually filling it in — to you. This one works the other way round: plan the trip in the free browser planner, export a CSV, and import it into Sheets already populated with your own days, times, places and costs.
The advantage of getting it into Sheets is not the grid. It's sharing. The planner deliberately has no server, so your itinerary lives only in your browser — great for privacy, useless for letting three other people edit it before a trip. Sheets is genuinely better at that one job.
What actually lands in the spreadsheet
The export is one row per stop, ten columns wide. The built-in five-day sample produces 30 data rows — 23 activities plus 7 transit legs — under this header:
| Column | Example value | Type in Sheets |
|---|---|---|
| Day | 1 | Number — groups rows for per-day formulas |
| Date | 2026-10-12 | ISO date — sorts correctly in every locale |
| Day title | Arrival · Shinjuku | Text |
| Time | 15:10 | Time — blank on transit rows |
| Duration (min) | 60 | Number — the pacing column |
| Type | food · sight · shop · hotel · other · transit | Text — the filter column |
| Title | Land at Narita Airport (NRT) | Text |
| Location | Narita, Chiba | Text |
| Notes | Terminal 1 · grab a Suica card | Text |
| Cost (USD) | 22 | Number — no currency symbol, so SUM works |
Two details in that table do more work than they look like they do.
The date is written as 2026-10-12, not 10/12/2026. ISO order sorts chronologically as plain text, which means the column is correct even before Sheets decides whether it is a date. It also sidesteps the day/month ambiguity that silently reorders a trip when the file crosses between US and European locales.
The Cost column is a bare number. No $, no thousands separator. A currency symbol turns the cell into text, and text does not add up — that single decision is the difference between SUM returning your budget and returning zero.
How to import it
- Build the trip. Open the planner and edit the sample into your own itinerary, or click "New blank trip" to start empty. Everything autosaves in your browser as you type.
- Click CSV. The button sits in the planner toolbar between Print and Export PDF. The file downloads straight from your browser — nothing is uploaded to us, because there is nowhere to upload it to.
- In Google Sheets, choose File → Import → Upload and pick the downloaded
.csv. - Set separator type to Comma and choose "Replace spreadsheet" for a fresh sheet, or "Insert new sheet" to keep an existing one. Leave "Convert text to numbers and dates" on — that is what makes the Date, Duration and Cost columns behave as numbers rather than strings.
- Share it. The Share button gives your travel companions view or edit access. This is the step the browser planner cannot do for you.
Three things worth doing once it is in Sheets
These use the actual column layout above, and the numbers in brackets are what the built-in sample returns, so you can check your formulas are working before you trust them on your own trip.
- Total the budget.
=SUM(J2:J1000)down the Cost column. The sample totals 231. For a single day,=SUMIF(A:A, 4, J:J)gives day four — 63 in the sample, the most expensive day because it is the Hakone day trip and the trains are the cost. - See how much of the trip is spent moving.
=SUMIF(F:F, "transit", E:E)totals the transit minutes, and=SUMIF(F:F, "<>transit", E:E)totals everything else. In the sample that is 359 minutes of transit against 1,875 minutes of activity — about 16% of all scheduled time is spent getting between places. Most itinerary templates never surface that number, and it is the one that decides whether a day feels relaxed or rushed. - Filter by type. Select the header row, then Data → Create a filter, and narrow column F to
foodto see every meal, orsightto count how much sightseeing you have actually committed to. The sample breaks down as 9 food, 8 sight, 3 shop, 1 hotel, 2 other and 7 transit.
Why the encoding and the quoting matter
Two things quietly break spreadsheets imported from other tools, and both are handled here.
Non-ASCII characters. Place names are full of them — Kabukichō, Sensō-ji, the · separator, the → in transit rows. In the sample export, 28 of the 30 rows contain at least one character outside plain ASCII. The file is written as UTF-8, which Google Sheets reads natively, so these arrive intact rather than as KabukichÅ. (The same file also opens correctly in Excel, which needs an extra byte-order mark to get UTF-8 right — that mark is included, and Sheets consumes it silently.)
Commas inside fields. "Narita, Chiba" contains the same character that separates the columns. 10 of the 30 sample rows have a comma inside a field. Every value is therefore quoted, following RFC 4180, so the address stays in one cell instead of pushing every column after it one place to the right.
Sheets, Excel, or PDF?
The same export serves all three, so pick by what you are about to do:
- Google Sheets when other people need to edit the plan, or when you want it reachable from any device without carrying a file around.
- Excel when you are doing the number work alone — pivot tables and heavier formulas are more comfortable there. Save as
.xlsxafter opening so formatting survives. - Google Docs for booking references and notes that read as prose — but not for the schedule, since a document cannot total or sort anything.
- PDF or print for the trip itself. A spreadsheet on a phone at a train station is a bad experience, and paper does not run out of battery.
A practical combination: plan in the browser, share a Sheet while everyone argues about the schedule, then export a final PDF each traveller carries.
Frequently asked questions
Is this Google Sheets travel itinerary template free?
Yes. Building the itinerary and exporting it to CSV is completely free with no sign-up on our side. You only need a Google account for Sheets itself.
Why import a CSV instead of copying a template sheet?
A copied template gives you an empty grid you still have to fill in. The CSV arrives already populated with your own trip — structure and content together, rather than structure and homework.
Will Japanese or accented place names import correctly?
Yes. The export is UTF-8 and Sheets reads UTF-8 natively. In the sample itinerary 28 of the 30 rows contain non-ASCII characters, so this matters more than it looks.
Can I total my trip budget in Google Sheets?
Yes. The Cost column holds plain numbers with no currency symbol, so SUM works directly. Use SUMIF against the Day column for per-day totals.
Can my travel companions edit the sheet too?
Yes — once it is in Sheets it behaves like any other sheet, so the Share button works normally. Sharing is the one thing the browser planner cannot do, because it deliberately has no server.
Ready to build it? Open the free travel itinerary template, plan your days, then click CSV.