Day Trips as Locations
When researching and creating a trip, you may plan to take one or more Day Trips to other locations, away from your Base Location.  Your Base Location is the current location where you are staying the night.  This may be something as simple as taking a tour bus to another location or taking a train to multiple locations before returning to your base location for the night.
A Day Trip is when you travel to one or more locations that are close enough to make a round-trip within a day, but does not require an overnight stay.
Here we go through creating a Day Trip using Locations.  When a Day Trip is created using Locations, you get full trip functionality for locations including activities.  Other methods are available using Day Trips as Activities with different levels of functionality.

Here we go through a Day Trip example but the application will also handle Side Trips.
A Side Trip is when you travel to one or more locations with an overnight stay, before returning to your base location.
When building a trip, you will add locations for every place you plan to visit where you have some type of activity.  When creating a Day Trip, there are a few additional steps that should be followed to make it stand out and function correctly.  Below we go through the different steps.  You should create a Location Group with the Day/Side Trip indicator set and assign it to all the locations that apply to your Day Trip.  Depending on when your Day Trip will take place from your base location, you may need to adjust the arrival date of certain locations on the Nights/Dates page.

In this example, our Day Trip will be to Pisa and Lucca from Florence

  • Our trip starts in Milan where we travel to Florence
  • We stay in Florence for 3 Nights
  • Take a Day Trip to Pisa and Lucca in the middle of our stay in Florence, returning to Florence the same day
  • Depart our last day in Florence for Orvieto
  • Continuing on with the rest of our trip to Frankfurt and Munich
  • Return to Milan

The steps to create a Day Trip include

1) Adding Trip Locations
2) Creating a Locations Group and assigning it to your Day Trip Locations (Optional)
3) Adjusting Location Arrival Dates
4) Travel Type Activities To/From Day Trip Locations
5) Mobile Trip Profile
 
1) Adding Trip Locations

On the 'Trip Planning - Locations' page, enter all the locations in the order you plan to visit them.

Milan-Florence-Pisa-Lucca-Orvieto-Frankfurt-Munich-Milan

Note that Pisa-Lucca will be a Day Trip and has been entered as would any other location.
 
2) Creating a Location Group and assigning it to your Day Trip Locations (Optional)


A Location Groups has been created for 'Pisa' as a Day Trip and for 'Germany' as a group.  The groups have then been assigned to the appropriate locations.

It is not required to create and assign a Day Trip group to your locations, but there are some advantages to it.

1) The Day Trip locations will stand out from other locations by the highlight color and Day Trip indicator
2) Using the Mobile Trip Profile, you will be able to select to display only the Day Trip locations
3) Using the Mobile Trip Profile, you can select to display the Main Trip locations which will not display the Day Trip locations

 See the example on the Location Group page detailing creating and assigning groups.
 
3) Adjusting Location Arrival Dates

The arrival dates have been adjusted forward and back to accommodate the Pisa/Lucca Day Trip.

The first stop of the Day Trip has been adjusted back two days to get it to the correct day from the base location.  After the Day Trip, when we depart Florence, we will go to Orvieto, so the arrival date has been adjusted forward two days.  The final departure from Florence is on 5 Dec. and now matches the arrival in Orvieto on the same day.

The most important step when creating a trip is to be sure the arrival and departure dates at all locations are correct.

See the example on the Trip Nights/Dates page explaining in detail adjusting location arrival dates.

Once your trip has been created and you know your actual travel departure date, you only need to change the date on the Nights/Dates screen and all location dates, including Day Trips will be adjusted accordingly.

 
4) Travel Type Activities To/From Day Trip Locations


Under Florence, we created a Travel Type activity for a Train to Pisa.  We also created an Activity Group titled Pisa with the same orange highlight color and assigned it to the activity.

You would create a similar activity at each Day Trip location where you will be traveling to another location.  On your last Day Trip location, you will create a similar activity for your travel back to your base location of Florence.

These activities will be used on the Initialize Travel Planner page to initialize the Travel Planner.

You can also create an Activity Group and assign it to any activity that is related to the Day Trip, so they have the same title and highlight color.  Using the Mobile Trip Profile, you can select to hide or display the individual Activity Groups.

The Mobile Trip Profile
Mobile display showing the grouped highlighted locations with the Day Trip indicator