Travel Journal Prompts

It’s true. Maintaining a travel journal requires a lot of motivation and effort.

If you have trouble maintaining your travel journal, you have arrived at the right place! Keeping up to date with your journal can be a tedious process, especially in the busyness of daily life. To save you the trouble of coming up with ideas of what to include, we have combined some of the best travel journal prompts to help you get started and allow your ideas to flow through. After all, travel journals are the best possession you can hold for yourself or a gift to a loved one. 

So whether your little travel buddy will accompany you or your loved ones on adventures, we have you covered. 

Let’s dive in!

What Is a Travel Journal?

For anyone who finds the idea confusing, let us first explain what a travel journal is. A blank travel journal is where you can document all your trip memories or future trip ideas. Your travel journal can be digital or paper, loose or bound, text-based or image-based. The limits are endless!

Travel journals can bear different meanings to different people. A blank travel journal might be exciting for you, a partially filled travel journal might be a motivation for you to continue exploring the world, while a full travel journal might contain some of the most precious memories you hold.

Reasons For Keeping a Travel Journal

Why would you or someone keep a travel journal in this technological world where social media can hold all of your memories? Simply put, nothing can beat the feeling of documenting your memories down in a physical format. The personalized touch of handwritten travel journals makes them super unique, and you can come up with gift ideas, such as a scrapbook, to share these priceless moments with someone special.

For teachers, you can come up with travel journal ideas with prompts for your students and encourage them to document their experiences. Not only would this allow them to reflect on their experiences in the present, but the journals would bring them immense nostalgia and joy as adults. After all, human beings tend to forget the intensity of emotions they felt while traveling. A travel journal can be a great reminder of all the heartfelt moments!

Other than documenting in your journal to keep the memories fresh, you can also use it to plan your trip as well as keep yourself organized throughout the journey. Journals help you stay sorted. Some scheduling and a to-do list never hurt anyone! 

Moreover, traveling experiences can be a great learning ground. Whether it is jotting down the name of the bakery that bakes the most scrumptious muffins or tips to avoid being a victim of scams, a travel journal can be your learning buddy!

Travel Journal Tips

Maintaining a travel journal with the right motivation can be difficult to execute. Good thing we are here to help. We have a few tips that you can follow to stay motivated throughout your journey. Don’t worry if any of these do not work for you, for everyone is different. One thing is for sure, no matter how different, each one of us can always find our reason to hold onto documenting in our personal travel journals.

Even the best travel journal book writers struggle with writing prompts, so we have listed some tips, ideas, and DIYs that you can use to help you stay motivated throughout the journey.

1. Document your day in the journal using different mediums

Yes, this is one of the essential tips to keep you motivated throughout your journey. Nobody likes being confined to text only. There needs to be more than just one way to channel the moments of your day into the journal.

You can document all your experiences or ideas in textual form. However, if you are not in the mood for writing, you can doodle or paste some printed images. These images can represent a monument, landmark, or scenario representing the best part of that day. You can make use of markers, pens, stickers, stamps, beads, pins, maps, tickets, or postcards; whatever makes your travel journal feel personal. Come up with creative travel journal ideas and maybe turn them into your favorite scrapbook.

2. Do not edit anything

Always go with the flow when documenting something in your journal. Try not to make too many edits and cut off anything that you write. Having raw, unedited thoughts help to keep it personal, besides, you can always refine your writing later should you choose to do so. Travel journals need to be your safe space, so come up with ideas and DIYs to give them your personal touch. This will keep you highly motivated.

3. Document complete stories

Don’t get me wrong, you do not need to include every single detail of your travel stories, but try to include as many details of each day as you can. You can make a travel journal with different layout ideas or separate cover and page ideas to help you stay motivated while documenting your story. Include as many prompts as you can in your travel journal, the more the better.

Use all your five senses and visualize the day you spent to document your day. Imagine how magical it would feel to relive these details later in life when you reread your journal.

Whatever you did today was enough; remember to be kind to yourself.

41 Travel Journal Prompts

Here is a list of 41 travel journal prompt ideas to get you started. Starting off your journal is usually the most challenging task. Once you get started, keeping up with it becomes a habit you will enjoy.

Without further ado, here are all the prompts to help you you document your journey forever:

1. Which places are on our bucket list?

2. What are your expectations from the trip?

3. Which sites do you wish to visit in each city?

4. What is the motivation behind visiting each of the sites?

5. Any disasters that happened while planning the trip?

6. Which site are you most excited to visit? Why?

7. Any stories you have heard about the sites you will be visiting?

8. Any advice you have heard of the locations you will be visiting?

9. What adventure has been your favorite so far?

10. What souvenirs do you have from your previous journeys?

11. What souvenirs do you expect to bring back from the trip you are planning?

12. As soon as you reached the destination, what did you feel?

13. What is the best highlight of your day?

14. Anything that you did today which helped you grow?

15. Any difficulty you experienced today, or any trouble you got into today?

16. Did you try a new adventure?

17. Did you eat something new?

18. What was the most wholesome moment of the day?

19. What made you smile, laugh, or cry today?

20. Which kind of people did you meet today?

21. How are the people here different from the people of your hometown?

22. Do you miss anything about home?

23. What cultural experiences and differences did you notice?

24. What is the morning view from your balcony?

25. How is the experience living with a roommate if you share a room?

26. Using five senses, describe how you feel about your destination?

27. Did you try anything that was out of your comfort zone?

28. Did you learn any new words or phrases today?

29. Does the destination remind you of another similar destination?

30. Do you miss someone on your trip?

31. Would you like to revisit any destination of your journey? If yes, with whom would you like to revisit the place?

32. Where do you plan your next journey?

33. Did things go exactly your way? If not, what were the expectations vs. reality?

34. What is something that you learned and would want to implement in your life?

35. Whom do you miss the most on your journey?

36. How did travel change you?

37. What is your craziest transport experience?

38. Is there any fear that you have overcome in this journey?

39. How has your residence experience been?

40. Was the planned time enough for you to visit all the listed sites? Would you want to stay some extra time in the place?

41. Any misconceptions that were cleared on this trip? It could be regarding the people or the location itself.

Conclusion

Traveling can be life-altering. Keeping a travel journal can be even more! If you do not own a travel journal, we urge you to start. The 41 prompts listed will definitely help you begin your journey and continue it for a lifetime. If you already maintain a travel journal, these prompts can serve as motivation. One day, we hope our travel journal ideas will bring a smile to your face as you read your responses to them years later. 

We wish you the best on your travel adventures!