How to make a client itinerary look professional

A client who has never been to Kyoto cannot tell whether you chose a good ryokan. They have no way to judge the thing you are actually expert at. So they judge the one artefact they can see: the itinerary you sent.

That is unfair and it is also the job. A document that looks considered makes the advice inside it feel considered. Here is what separates the two, in rough order of how much difference each one makes.

1. Use real photographs of the actual places

The single biggest tell. A generic beach next to a hotel that is not on a beach is noticed, and once a client catches one thing that is not true, they start reading everything else with suspicion.

Fewer, correct photographs beat more, decorative ones. If you cannot find a real image of the place, use no image.

Where to get them legally

Unsplash and Pexels are free for commercial use. Suppliers and tourism boards will almost always give you their press images if you ask, and they are usually better than anything free. Do not pull photographs off a hotel's website without asking, and never off someone's Instagram.

2. Pick two typefaces and stop

One for headings, one for body text. That is a whole design system. Four typefaces is the most reliable sign that a document was assembled rather than designed.

A serif for headings and a plain sans-serif for body text is a safe pairing that has never once looked cheap. Set body text around 16px — small type reads as a form, large type reads as a book.

3. Leave more white space than feels comfortable

Amateur documents are dense because dense feels thorough. It reads as anxious. Space around a section is what tells the eye the section is important, and it is free.

Practical version: double the gap above every heading. Nothing else. It will look better immediately.

4. Name each day something

“Day 6” is a row number. “A slow morning in Gion” is a holiday. The title costs you four words and it is the thing that makes a schedule feel like a trip somebody planned.

Whatever you title it, make the summary list at the top use the same title. Two names for one day reads like two different days, and it is the fastest way to make a careful document feel careless.

5. Repeat the hotel every single day

Name, address, phone number, on every day they are staying there — even when it has not changed. It looks redundant on screen. It is the most useful thing in the document at 11pm in the back of a taxi with a driver who does not speak English.

Include the address in the local language and script where that applies. Advisors who do this get remembered for it.

6. Say one sentence about why

“The Ritz-Carlton, 4 nights” is a booking. “The Ritz-Carlton — I put you here because it is the only hotel in the district with a garden, and after three days of temples you will want one” is advice.

You only need it for the hotels and the two or three choices you thought hardest about. It is the difference between a document that proves you booked things and one that proves you thought.

7. Be honest about the hard days

If it is nine hours door to door, write nine hours. If the hike is steep, say steep. Under-selling a hard day is the number one source of the mid-trip complaint, and naming it in advance turns the same nine hours into something you warned them about.

8. Design it for a phone

A four-column table looks correct on your laptop and is unusable on the device your client will actually read it on. Single column, generous type, nothing that needs pinching.

Test it yourself: send the finished thing to your own phone and try to find the Tuesday hotel address in under ten seconds. If you cannot, neither can they.

9. Proof the boring fields

Dates, times, and the spelling of their names. A misspelled surname on page one undoes every other thing on this list, and it is the one mistake clients tell other people about.

Check the year on every date. It is the error nobody proofreads for.

The small tells that give it away

• Two different date formats in one document
• A logo that is slightly blurry because it was pasted from an email
• Supplier boilerplate left in, in a different font
• “TBC” anywhere a client can see it
• A file called Chen itinerary FINAL v3 (2).pdf

That last one is worth thirty seconds. Name the file Chen — Japan — October 2026.pdf and it looks like a deliverable rather than a draft that escaped.

None of this is the hard part

Every item on this list is achievable in Word. The problem is that doing all nine, by hand, for every trip, is an evening — and then the transfer time changes and you do the export and the re-send again.

Ivory Maps does the nine for you. Drop in the documents you already have and you get a branded page back: named days, real photographs of the actual places, the hotel repeated where it needs to be, a route map, built for a phone, with a PDF export for the clients who want paper.

See it with one of your own trips

No account needed to try it. If you would rather see finished work first, the examples are complete itineraries, not screenshots.