All About Travel BINGO

The Trip Clip’s BINGO activity is an excellent addition to any trip you take – even just a trip around town! There are 1500 images available to make any BINGO board you want. You can shuffle and edit each board, or have the website automatically generate an unlimited number of new boards.

8 Types of Travel Bingo

For each type of BINGO, there is a curated set of images you can use to make your BINGO boards – you can see below how many images there are to choose from for each type of board. I add more images regularly too (read more about this below).

• Car BINGO: 115 pictures
• Road Trip BINGO: 190 pictures
• Road Sign BINGO: 41 pictures
• Airport BINGO: 95 pictures
• Airplane BINGO: 90 pictures
• Alphabet BINGO: 26 letters, upper and lower case
• Restaurant BINGO: 98 pictures
• Custom BINGO: 1500 pictures

How To Play Travel bingo

There are lots of ways to play Travel BINGO. Here are my ideas:

• 5 in a row: Have your kids find 5 in a row (across, up and down, or diagonally) to win.
• Fill the board: For more of a challenge, have them try to find every item on the board.
• Time them: If they want to turn it into a game, time them to see how long it takes them to find 5 in a row, or find everything on the board. Then see if they can beat their time the next time.
• How many? You can also make it competitive by giving them a board each time you get in the car, and count how many they can find by the time you get to your destination (or by the time the food comes at the restaurant, or by the time you board your airplane, etc.)
• Cooperative multiplayer: If you have multiple kids, print the same board, and have them work together to find everything on the board.
• Competitive multiplayer: If you have multiple kids, give each one a different board, and see who can find five in a row first.
• Competitive multiplayer 2: If you have multiple kids, give each one their own board, and see who can find them all first. If no one finds them all, the person who finds the most wins.
• Alphabet BINGO: This particular game can be super versatile on trips. Click here for creative ways to use the Alphabet BINGO boards.

Have your own ideas? Please send them to me!

Whether you’re playing these games in the car, on an airplane, or at a restaurant, using them with a clipboard and pen from The Trip Clip really enhances the experience. The Trip Clip clipboard is kid-sized at 6″x9″. It fits great in little hands and in a travel backpack. The attached pen makes it always available and ready to use instantly. The BINGO boards all print on a half sheet of paper to fit into the memo sized board.

My kids wanted a BINGO board at the top of their stack of activities for every trip. We found it was a great way to spend the time at the gate waiting to board our plane, and on road trips we enjoyed searching together as a family for all of the items on the board to see if we could fill the whole thing.

AUTOMATICALLY GENERATE BOARDS

The Trip Clip website will automatically generate a board for you by randomly choosing 24 images from the collection. Here’s how to generate a new board:

1. Go to the Bingo activity
2. Choose the type of board you want to create (e.g. Car BINGO). On the PC this is a radio button on the left side of the screen.
3. If you’ve already created a BINGO board of this type (Car), this will pull up a saved board (see saving a board below)
4. To generate a brand new board, click the menu button (3 horizontal lines) in the upper right above the BINGO board.
5. Choose “Add New Bingo”. This will generate a random BINGO board based on the current board type. If you want to create a new bingo of a different type, choose ‘Switch bingo type’.

If you want to generate a bunch of unique BINGO boards all of the same type, follow these steps to use the Activity Book feature:

1. On a PC, go to the Bingo activity and click Print Book above the preview of the BINGO board. On a mobile device, go to the Home page, scroll down to the Fun & Educational Activities section and click the last button for Activity Book.
2. Check the checkbox for Bingo, and uncheck all of the other checkboxes..
3. Use the dropdown box to select your type of bingo. For example, if you want to make Road Trip BINGO boards for an upcoming trip, select Road Trip BINGO in the drop down.
4. Choose how many boards you want. I usually made 2 boards for each of my kids (4 total) – one for the way there, one for the way back.
5. Click Add To Print Queue
6. Click Print and you’re done!

Once you have a board, there are a bunch of things you can do:

• Edit the board
• Print the board
• Add it to the print queue
• Shuffle the board
• Save the board

Keep reading to learn about how to do all of these things!

change a single square

Once the website has generated a BINGO board, you can edit individual squares to make it just right for your kids. For example, your board might have a picture on it (like the boat) that you know you won’t see on your trip because you won’t be anywhere near water:

You can click the red x to remove the Boat from your board, and then either click an image on the left or drag one over into the empty space.

Shuffle the Board

Once you have a set of images you like, you may want to just scramble those 24 images so that everyone’s board has the same pictures, just in different places. There is a Shuffle this board link to let you create many boards with the exact same pictures. I recommend adding each board to the Print Queue after you shuffle the images.

Create a board from scratch

In addition to replacing individual squares, you can hand pick every image on your board. Do this by clicking the “Remove all” button to make an empty board. Then add the pictures you want to your board. On a tablet or PC, click pictures on the left, or drag them over to an empty square, to place exactly the images you want exactly where you want them. On a phone, click the Add Items button to see all of the clipart. The items you click will be added to your bingo board in the order you click on them.

CREATE, EDIT, AND SAVE AS MANY BINGO boards AS YOU WANT

Every BINGO board you make is saved automatically to the cloud, and you can keep adding new BINGO boards while preserving any that you want to use again. The best way to ‘save’ a bingo board is to give it a unique name so you can find it again, and then be sure to use the menu in the upper right corner and select ‘Add new bingo’ when you want to make a new one, so that your current BINGO board is preserved as is.

Here’s an example of a board I wanted to save:

I created this BINGO to use as a learning tool with my kids, and I used a modified version of it for years whenever we went to the airport. In addition to keeping them entertained, I wanted to use the opportunity to teach them some things about how the airport works. I’m always thinking ahead to when they will need to know how to do things like navigate an airport on their own!

The first square is a spot to tell them our gate #. I used this board on every trip, and had the kids practice reading the signs in the airport to find our gate. This taught them to learn how to read the signs, and also gave me a little more confidence they would know how to get to the gate on their own if we ever got separated.

Asking them to find words in a foreign language gave us lots of opportunities to talk about all different people who travel through the airport. Since we live in the Pacific Northwest, there are signs in Chinese, Thai, Japanese, and other languages that don’t use roman characters, which means there are lots of interesting writing systems to talk about.

The dollar sign was fun when they were little to just to have some conversations about the things we pay for, and what they cost.

Teaching them how to use the signs to find a restroom is just a good skill for everyone to have!

Looking for the luggage train was a favorite of theirs when they were little. They always wanted to sit by the window and watch for the luggage, the food delivery trucks, the fuel trucks, and the employees directing traffic. There was never a shortage of things for us to talk about and for them to learn about as we looked out the window.

The picture of the airport employees was a safety measure. We taught them how to look for safe people who worked at the airport who could help them if they ever got lost or were in trouble. We also talked about all the different jobs people do at the airport.

The “City name on the arrival and departures board” was a way to teach them about how to read the boards for information they’ll need if they’re navigating an airport alone some day. They loved to find the right board and figure out how to search for our flight on it.

After taking the time to carefully craft this educational BINGO board, I wanted to save it so I could adapt it to their age for each future trip.

CUSTOM BINGO

The custom BINGO board is special because it lets you add any clipart from across all the different types of BINGO boards to a single board. It can be a little hard to find the images you want for a custom BINGO board because there are so many images, so I highly recommend using the Search box at the top of the page. The search scans the text label for each image, so if you can’t find what you’re looking for, try altering your search to see if you can match something in the set of pictures. For instance, if you want to add ‘pool’ to your list, you can search for pool or swim to see if either of those words pops up something you want. You can also search for bathing suit, goggles, towel, sunglasses, or anything else that might be related to the activity that would work in your list!

Upload Your Own Images

You can upload your own images if there is something you want on your BINGO board that you don’t see in the list of images. Here are the steps to follow:

1. From a PC, look for Step 2: SELECT at the top middle of the page. If you’re editing your list from a phone, go to the list, use the drop down menu in the upper right corner to select ‘Edit list’, and then tap the button to “Add Items”.
2. Above the clipart, select the checkbox labeled “Upload a picture”. You’ll be prompted to choose a picture from you computer, or if you’re on your phone, you can choose a picture from your photo library or take a new photo.
3. Once you’ve selected a picture, the picture will be uploaded to The Trip Clip website. Your pictures are completely private and are not visible to anyone else. You’ll be prompted to enter a label for your picture. This label will appear under your picture when you add it to a BINGO board (it can be easily edited later), and it will also be the keywords that you can search on later to find it again. Any pictures you add will be available for you to add to any list or BINGO board you create with The Trip Clip.

Because The Trip Clip lists show a small picture, the best images will be

• simple
• zoomed in on a single object
• square
• around 1000×1000 pixels
• have a file size less than 8MB

YOU CAN REQUEST ADDITIONAL PICTURES

In some circumstances you may have a picture you’d like to put on a BINGO board and adding your own won’t work for you for some reason. In this scenario, please let me know! I get requests from customers all the time for additional clipart, and I do my very best to add the items that are requested. You can see from this roll-up of all of my new clipart posts that I’ve been increasing my clipart collection for years! I love it when I hear from customers with new requests.

I’ve also been working on making sure my clipart is diverse, and I truly need help from my customers to do this well, because I am just one person with one perspective on the world. People from different cultures, ethnic backgrounds, religions, and parts of the world have all contacted me to teach me about things that are important in their lives and to their families and I have loved to learn from them and to find the clipart they need to help make my website more useful for them!

WRITE ANY TEXT IN ANY LANGUAGE

When you add a picture to your BINGO board (by clicking on it or dragging it onto the board) the default text that goes along with the picture will be added to your list. You can change this text by clicking on the item once it’s in your list. This is great for making your BINGO boards super customized for your kids, and it’s also great for being able to write in any language. I’ve worked hard to make sure I have full language support for as many languages as I possibly can. You can make your BINGO boards in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

If you run into any problems making a BINGO board in your own language, please email me and let me know, and I will do the work to add support for a new language if I possibly can!

It’s also possible to put text-only items on your BINGO board. Here are the steps to follow to do this:

1. Make sure there is an empty square in your board. You can make an empty square by clicking the red x.
2. Click ‘Enter text only items’
3. Enter your text. Each line of text will go into a new square.
4. Click ‘Add’ if you want them to go into the BINGO board in the same order your entered them.
5. Click ‘Shuffle Then Add’ if you want them to go into the BINGO board in a random order.

MOBILE BINGO

All of the BINGO boards you make can be used from a mobile device like a phone or an iPad. The great thing about this is that you don’t have to do anything extra at all for your BINGO boards to work from a mobile device. The Trip Clip is a cloud-based system, so every board you make is automatically saved (no need to click a save button) and will be instantly available from your account on any device. You just need to use the browser from the device to navigate to TheTripClip.com, and sign in to your account to access all of your BINGO boards.

On mobile devices, the BINGO boards are interactive. Your kids can click each item as they see them to aim for 5-in-a-row or try to find every item on the board.

PRINT OPTIONS

Your BINGO boards will print on a half sheet of paper in landscape format. You can choose to print in color or in black and white, and for non-US customers, you can specify that you want to print on A4 paper and the layout will be adjusted accordingly.

For anyone who wants to print in color but doesn’t have a color printer, all of The Trip Clip BINGO boards are generated as PDFs that can be saved and then emailed or carried on a removable drive to a print shop that can print your PDF in color for you.

Try Some Now

Print these free

You can find more free bingo boards, and try these interactively on mobile here.