The core business of travel companies, especially wholesalers and tour operators, is derived from

selling tour packages. For any tour package to be designed, a well thought planned itinerary is most
essential. Itinerary is central to any tour package around which all the other features are incorporated.
A lot of planning, additions, deletions go into the process before final itinerary and the route along
which a tour should be organised. The next stage is to design and package a tour around this itinerary
which is developed into a final product for sale to prospective clients. Travel industry offers listless
tour packages from tailor-made, customised to specialised. Hence, itinerary planning and tour
packaging are considered to be central to the business of travel companies.

Travel Agency Management and Operation HTT455 is a course designed to provide knowledge on
the management of travel and tour agency. Travel and tour agency serves as an important
intermediary in tourism industry. Hence, the students who enrol in this course will be given
theoretical foundation and principles of managing a travel and tour agency effectively. They will also
engage in activities that can enhance their operation skills particularly in tour package development
including formulating a feasible itinerary. An itinerary is a plan of a journey showing the route and
the places that the visitor will visit. With regard to itinerary, most common problem associate with
designing itinerary among students is lack comprehensiveness. It is important to note that, the quality
of a tour package is determined by the suitability, nature and comprehensiveness of a tour itinerary.
Greater efforts are needed to ensure students comprehend structured process of planning an itinerary.
Thus, a reasonable approach to tackle this issue is to introduce an itinerary planning cheat sheet.
Cheat sheet is a concentrated set of notes used for quick reference or simply a resource to make one
life easier. The novelty of this approach is that students easily remember procedure to develop
itinerary step by step in a concise and structured designed instead of keeping set of long notes written
in a book or paper. The students can now turn into cheat sheet (concise and structured) electronically.
This approach can also be applied in a Micro-credential course as to facilitate students’ skills.

An itinerary is a plan of a journey showing the route and the places that the
visitor will visit. Thus, it is a schedule or timetable produced in association with
a package tour. It is basically designed to identify the route, day-by-day journey
format, origin, destination, and all the enroute halting points, period of halts
along with accommodation, mode of travel, activities and other services offered
during a visitor’s tour.

An itinerary is not just a piece of information but a selling point aimed at

convincing potential customers. Itineraries are also produced for travellers’
booking flights; it then includes departure time, airport, terminal details, flight
number, baggage limits, transits, seat allocation and minimum check-in time,
which doesn’t really include any marketing element. But package tour itineraries
play a key role in attracting clients.

The quality of a tour package is determined by the suitability, nature and

comprehensiveness of a tour itinerary. It is generally printed in tour brochures
but only after the clearance from the expert team as it includes logical inclusion
and sequential arrangement of a variety of features.