Travel journal and trip recap: keep memories

At the end of a trip you think you will remember everything: the name of the little restaurant, the view from the hill, the conversation on the train. A few months later, often only the photos are left – and even they sit unsorted between screenshots and pictures of a shopping list. This guide shows how to keep travel memories with little effort: a travel journal that takes five minutes a day, a system for photos and paper, a list of the countries you have visited and a recap you will still enjoy looking at years later.

During the trip: five minutes in the evening

The biggest obstacle to a travel journal is ambition. Plan to write a page every evening and you will stop on day three. A fixed, short format works better:

• Three sentences a day: what did you do? What surprised you? One detail you would otherwise forget – a smell, a sentence, a price on a menu.
• Write names down: restaurants, cafés, hiking trails, people you met. These are the hardest things to reconstruct later.
• Write at the same time: over dinner, say, or before you go to sleep. With a fixed habit it works even on busy days.

Whether you write on paper, in a notes app or in a travel journal app matters less. What matters is that the notes end up in one place.

Photos: sort a little every day

Most travellers come home with hundreds of photos and never look at them again. A small daily routine helps against the chaos:

1. Mark the best three photos every evening – as favourites or in an album for the trip.
2. Delete duplicates and failed shots straight away, while you still know which one was best.
3. Take a photo of the place sign or entrance before you visit somewhere. Later you will know where the next pictures were taken.
4. Photograph small things too: the menu, the train ticket, the room, the view from the balcony. These are the pictures that tell the story later.

Back up your photos whenever you have Wi-Fi. If your plan does not cover your destination and you want to back up over mobile data, a travel eSIM is often cheaper than roaming – for example an eSIM for Portugal^* from Airalo.

Collect paper: one envelope per trip

Entry tickets, train tickets, beer mats, a city map with coffee stains: paper is one of the best memories because you can hold it. Take a sturdy envelope and put everything you come across into it. At home, write the destination and date on the outside. Many tickets are now digital only, for example tickets for museums in Copenhagen^* that you can buy at Tiqets – take a screenshot before the booking disappears from your inbox one day.

Counting countries visited

A list of countries visited is the simplest trip recap for many people. Before you start, decide on a rule for what counts as a visit – otherwise the list becomes arbitrary. Common rules:

• At least one night in the country – the strictest and clearest rule.
• Leaving the airport – a transfer does not count, a walk through town during a long layover does.
• Setting foot on the ground – includes day trips across a border.

The usual reference is the 193 member states of the United Nations, often plus the two observer states, Vatican City and Palestine – 195 in total. How you count territories such as Greenland or Hong Kong is up to you.

Base map: Natural Earth

After the trip: the recap

The best window for a recap is the first week after you get home. Your memories are fresh and the photos are not yet buried under new ones. Which format you choose depends on how much time you want to invest:

A good compromise: right after the trip, a short story or an album of 20 to 30 pictures, and once a year a photo book with all your trips.

How YesTrip keeps your trips

YesTrip is a free trip planner that does not stop when the trip ends. Your passport collects every trip: a stamp for each country, a globe, badges and your own ranking. You give countries, cities and flights 1 to 5 stars – that becomes the list of your favourite countries, and YesTrip suggests more places like the ones you love. Places from past trips are added automatically. Earlier trips you add yourself: add a country or city, log flights by flight number, and the distance and duration are calculated for you.

At the end of the year, your travel year shows how many days you were away, how many trips, countries, cities and flights there were, how many kilometres in the air, plus highlights such as the longest trip and new countries. It is counted from your trips and your passport on the device; upcoming trips do not count yet. You can play the recap as a story and share it.

For each single trip there is also a recap as a 9:16 story: made from your plan and your photos, one page per day with the day's stops and the trip's numbers at the end. You can change the headline and the last words, choose the pace and leave photos out or add them. For days without your own photos, YesTrip can use freely licensed photos from Wikimedia Commons with the author named. You save the story as a video – or as an image if your browser cannot record video.

Your data: photos are stored on your device and never uploaded, not even with an account. Tickets are stored on your device and also, encrypted, in your account so they show on all your devices. The story is made on the phone; photos only leave it when you share the result yourself. With an account, trips, travel profile and passport are saved so you can use them on several devices.

What YesTrip is not: a journal for long texts or a photo book service. You can save a note for every stop; for longer journal entries, a notebook or a notes app is the better tool.

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