Every spring I visit my sweet best friend, Sandy. We lived together during and after college, and are now miles apart in Philadelphia (me), and St. Louis (her). We’ve been able to stay close via weekly scheduled phone calls (which brighten every Tuesday), and annual visits.
Whenever I visit Sandy she presents me with the most genius idea, which I hereby name a Visitor Activity Menu. What this means it that before I arrive, she creates a list of all of the potential activities we can do, the food we can eat, and our time constraints for activities and dining. As soon as I arrive we sit down and use this menu to plan out the visit for maximum fun and maximum yum.
The menu breaks down the food options and activity options in a format that’s easy to read and select from. It’s the best way to plan for guest visits, especially in the upcoming holiday season!
Here’s how the visitor activity menu works:
- The host fills out a “visitor activity menu” with choices for their guest to pick from. This includes options for food and entertainment.
This is what the visitor activity menu looks like once the the host fills it out:
The guest reviews the “menu”, and then they fill out the accompanying schedule with their desired food and activity choices. The schedule is broken down into activity time frames (morning, afternoon, evening) and meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert).
Here’s what a completed schedule looks like after the guest makes their selections:
I am a poor planner and an much worse decision maker, so as a guest I absolutely love and appreciate this gesture. The visitor activity menu allows a guest to truly feel like they are taken care of and will be fed and entertained, without any extra research or effort on their part.
This menu also takes off the pressure of the hosts needing to guide their guest through the visit or try to figure out how to fill up time as they go along – it’s all up to the guest!
Planning out activities and food at the beginning of a visit also eliminates the, “What should we do now? Should we go out to eat? Should we stay in?” conversations that can take up so much time and create stress during visits.
I love this visitor activity menu so much, I wanted to share it for your use as well.
Click here to download/print my template for the visitor activity menu for your next visitor:
You can adapt this template for your visitors and make it your own. I hope it makes your future guest visits even more enjoyable and fun! Happy visiting!
xo, Liz
