You’ve seen the beautiful travel photos, the reels that seem to capture a person’s entire trip, travel guide blogs, and Tiktok videos with silly transitions from place to place. Travel content is some of my favorite content to create and consume, but you have to go in with a plan. Whether you are just doing this to document your trip for yourself or for content for your business the planning process will work the same way. 

Before the Trip

• This step is probably the most fun because all it requires you to do is learn more about the place you are heading to and make lists and reservations. Once you have a good idea of where you will be staying, what activities you will be doing, how much extra time you do or don’t have, and some general thoughts on the vibe of your trip. I like to think of this as my trip mood board moment. If you are creating content with the intention of sharing recommendations I suggest adding all of your plans to one Google sheet or notion board and you can separate sections by food/activities/hotels/shopping/misc. 
• Now that you know where you are going start thinking about the content you want to make. You can look for new trends on TikTok, see what people include in their travel blogs, and save photos to a collection on Instagram with location recommendations. 
• Either start a new Google sheet or add another tab to your travel sheet or board on Notion. This will be for a shot list. If you’ve never created a shot list, don’t worry, it’s not complicated. You are going to have the following columns shot inspiration, location, taken y/n, and notes. In each column, you will list the photos you want or link to an example you found online. Make this list longer than you can actually complete because you will want more than one idea per location. 

Here’s a short list of templates I love that you could try and recreate. 

• Template for a restaurant review. 
• Template for what’s in your day bag.
• Transition for sharing your travel destination on TikTok. 
• Inspiration for scenic content.

On the Trip

• I recommend scheduling actual time into your schedule for photos at the beginning of a trip if you are creating this content with the hopes of growing your business or giving good recommendations to anyone. 
• I also suggest taking photos of a location immediately when you get there just to get them out of the way. The reason for this is sometimes things come up and it’s better to have gotten some content instead of missing out entirely. 
• Don’t forget to check off content as you capture it. I like to review once a day and just delete photos and mark things off if there is downtime. 
• Put your phone away after you’ve gotten some content! Everyone will have a different amount of time they want to spend getting content for different purposes, but I truly think you can get a good amount of content in under an hour a day just by planning in advance and using these tips.

Post Trip

Usually, when I am returning from a trip I have some downtime at an airport, waiting for ubers, lunch with my luggage, so I usually will start reviewing content a little then. I like to favorite the best shots and even put them into folders depending on how I will be sharing a blog post or recommendation reel. You can do this whenever you want, I like to do it within 48 hours so that everything is fresh. 

• Pull out your shot list and see which ones you successfully took. 
• If you are trying to be strategic about sharing your content, then use a content calendar to plan out when you want posts to go live. If you are going this route then I suggest batch-editing your content at once. Create all your reels one day, edit photos the next, and write captions and blog posts the next day. 
• I schedule all of my Instagram posts in Planoly and get reminders for when to post.