Booking a couples trip can require a lot of time and planning. Getting together, and deciding on what you all want can be hard, especially while trying to coordinate everyone’s schedules. To help, i’ve put together four things you can do to make your planning process breeze.

Schedule Planning Nights

Schedule a few nights with everyone to go over your trip and talk about booking flights and hotels. This can be in person, over the phone, or Skype! Setting aside time to plan and book flights together will make your lives a LOT easier. And this will ensure that everyone is one the same page, when it comes to dates, itineraries, etc.

Share Your Expectations

It’s important to know what everyone expects out of the trip and what each couple is willing to do or not do. Be sure to talk before booking everything, and make sure everyone knows each other’s expectations. This could include everything from what time of day they want to fly, to excursions they want to participate in, to how much money they are willing to spend. Discussing all of this up front will save yourself from some headaches later on!

Create a Google Doc

When we planned our couples trip to Europe, having everything in a Google doc was the key to my sanity.

Create one document with your full itinerary (flight dates, times and confirmation number of each person), hotel/Airb&b information (dates, confirmation numbers and host information), excursion information, and contact information for everyone. This is great to have with your while traveling, so you can have all of your information in one place. It is also great to send a copy to someone not going on the trip, so they have everyone’s information and could help from home if needed.

Another document that we created was an excel doc with a list of everything we wanted to do. On this, we added links to buy tickets to excisions, or general information to discuss during our planning calls. If we all liked an idea, we would book it during out call and add the information to our itinerary. Having these documents available to edits and see at any time was great! And it helped with the back and forth of questions about the trip.

Remember That It’s ok to do Things Separately

This is something that I can’t stress enough! It’s totally ok if you don’t want to spend every second of your trip with the other couple! If you want a dinner alone, or to go on a different excursion, do it!