I love traveling to new destinations across the globe to explore local cultures. The fact that I have a remote job makes things easier, since I can go on workcations without worrying about skipping work. While going on a vacation is easy for me, planning one is challenging. I like to plan my itinerary well in advance, so I don't miss out on any place that's on my wishlist. Planning a trip well also allows me to dedicate ample time to each place I'm traveling to, since I have a set schedule and I don't need to rush. Until recently, I used to plan all of this using my note-taking app of choice — Google Keep. However, planning an itinerary for multiple days got rather messy due to the app's limitations.

So, I started looking for alternatives. I tried Notion since it has a bunch of templates. However, it's too cluttered for my liking. I don't want to have my work notes and travel plan in the same app. When I'd almost decided to download a generic app that showed up when I looked for a travel planner on the Play Store or App Store, I stumbled upon AdventureLog. It's an open-source, self-hosted travel planner that's completely free to use and has a bunch of cool features that make it a treat to plan, organize, and log your journey across the world. Safe to say, it's become a mainstay in Docker for me. Here's how you can use it to plan your travel.

Beautiful yet simple UI

Easy to access itineraries

As soon as you access AdventureLog after hosting it via Docker, you will be greeted with a screen to create an account. Once you do that, you're taken to the homepage where you can view the list of destinations you've visited, the number of countries, regions, and cities you've traveled to, etc. The same page also displays your recent trips or adventures. To start planning a trip, you can add a new adventure and fill in the relevant details. You can then access the newly created trip card and add multiple itineraries under it. For instance, let's say you're planning a week-long trip. You can add seven different itineraries (one for each day) to the trip you created.

This will help you plan each day thoroughly. As for adding the details to create an itinerary -- AdventureLog offers a full-fledged editing suite that's easy to use. You can format your text in different ways, add headings, emojis, images, bullet points, etc. This way, you can create an itinerary that's tailored to your requirements.

Makes travel planning a breeze

It can even become a travelogue

AdventureLog even lets you add map locations of all the destinations you wish to visit. This makes it easy to find and navigate to the place during your journey. Then comes the ability to add tags to make it easy to find your past and upcoming trips. Depending on the type of place you visit, you can create corresponding tags. For example, your tags can be along the lines of 'beach', 'mountains', 'resort', 'local', 'international', etc. The search functionality is quite good, so all you have to do is look for a tag, and all the relevant results will show up.

You can also set trips as upcoming or completed, so that's another tag that you can add to differentiate between your travel plans and completed vacations. Speaking of completed vacations, I absolutely love how AdventureLog is not only useful for planning upcoming trips, but it's also an excellent way to log experiences and encounters throughout your journey. Once you're done with the day's itinerary, you can overwrite the same page with everything you did on that day. The places you went to, how you felt, what type of food you ate, etc. There's also the ability to add images, so upload as many as you want, relevant to all the activities you did on that day. This makes it an online travel diary of sorts, which you can maintain for all your trips going forward.

Some additional features include the ability to view all the countries you've visited and all the cities you've been to in a map view. If you often travel to different parts of the world, it would be fun to populate all the locations you've visited on the world map.

Plan every single day of your vacation

The best part about planning a vacation and maintaining an itinerary to follow every day is that you don't have to spend time while traveling to figure out what you want to do or where you want to go next. All you have to do is follow your itinerary using AdventureLog and enjoy your trip! The fact that the service can be accessed from any device once you host it on your home network is extremely helpful when traveling. Moreover, you can also use it to maintain a repository of your vacations, which is extremely handy if you wish to relive your memories in the future.