Speaking Part 2 · ExperiencesIn the Sep–Dec 2026 reported set
Describe a Time When You Had to Change Your Plan
In short
“Describe a Time When You Had to Change Your Plan” is a common IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card. You get 1 minute to prepare and should speak for 1–2 minutes, covering all four points below. This page gives you a Band 9 model answer, an idea map so you can make it your own, the Part 3 follow-up questions with answers, and the vocabulary examiners reward.
The task card
Describe a Time When You Had to Change Your Plan. You should say:
- •What the original plan was
- •Why you had to change it
- •What you did instead
- •And explain how you felt about the change
Band 9 model answer
The change I'll describe happened last spring, when my sister was getting married and I'd been planning the whole thing around a trip the four of us — me, my parents and my brother — were going to make together. We'd booked flights months ahead, we had the hotel, and the plan was to arrive four days early and have a proper family week around the wedding itself.
Then about ten days before, my father had a fall and broke his wrist. Nothing life-threatening, thankfully, but he needed a small operation and the surgeon was quite clear that flying that soon afterwards wasn't sensible. And because my mother wasn't going to leave him, that meant two of the four of us weren't going anywhere — with non-refundable flights and a wedding that obviously wasn't going to move.
What we did instead took about two days of fairly frantic rearranging. My brother and I flew out as planned, because somebody from our side had to be there. We moved my parents' flights to a week later so they could come for a smaller family gathering afterwards, which cost a painful amount in change fees. And the part I'm actually pleased with — we set up a tablet on a stand at the ceremony so my parents could watch it live. My mother was in tears, my father held the camera up to show us his cast, and it wasn't the same, obviously, but it was a long way better than nothing.
How I felt about it changed as it went along. The first reaction was pure frustration, I'll admit — months of planning undone by a slippery step. There was a stretch of about a day where I was quietly furious at the situation, which in hindsight was really just worry about my father wearing a different face.
But what I felt afterwards was something closer to relief, and a bit of pride in how everyone handled it. Nobody blamed anybody, nobody sulked, we just redistributed the problem and got on with it. My sister was completely unbothered about the change, which took the pressure off enormously.
And the thing I took from it is that I'd massively overestimated how much the plan mattered. I'd been treating the itinerary as the point, when the point was obviously the wedding. Since then I've been a bit less rigid about that sort of thing — I still plan, because I'd be hopeless otherwise, but I hold it more loosely.
Make it your own: three angles
A trip disrupted by illness or a cancellation
The most natural fit — it gives you a clear before, a clear cause and a clear improvised solution, which maps exactly onto the four bullets.
A change of course, job or study plan
Bigger stakes and a longer timeline, which suits a more reflective answer. Good if you can name the moment you decided.
An event you had to reorganise for others
Lets you show problem-solving under pressure and use a lot of practical detail — strong if you were the one fixing it.
What the examiner is listening for
The fourth bullet asks how you FELT, and this is the one candidates rush. Feelings that change across the story — frustration, then relief, then a lesson — give you far more to say than a single steady emotion, and they let you use a wider range of past forms. Watch the tense discipline: 'we'd booked', 'we were going to', 'I'd overestimated' are what separate a 7 from an 8 here.
Part 1 warm-up questions
- Do you usually plan things in advance?
- Are you good at making decisions quickly?
- Has a plan of yours ever gone wrong?
- Do you prefer a fixed schedule or a flexible day?
Part 3 follow-up questions & answers
Why do people find changes of plan stressful?
Partly because a plan is a way of feeling in control, so losing it feels like losing control rather than just changing an arrangement. There's also sunk cost — you've already invested time, money and anticipation, and abandoning that feels like waste. And for a lot of people the stress is really about the unknown: the new plan hasn't been thought through yet, so it looks riskier than it probably is.
Is it better to plan carefully or to be spontaneous?
It depends what's at stake. For anything with logistics or other people's time involved, planning saves an enormous amount of friction. For a free day or a holiday, over-planning can strip out the discoveries that make it memorable. The people who seem to manage best have a plan but don't treat it as a contract — they know which parts are fixed and which are negotiable.
Do you think technology has made it easier to change plans?
Considerably, yes. You can rebook a flight, message everyone affected and find an alternative in minutes, where that used to take days of phone calls. The less welcome side is that because changing plans is now so easy, people do it far more casually — last-minute cancellations have become socially acceptable in a way they weren't, and that's quietly corrosive.
Should children be taught to be flexible?
I'd say so, though it's hard to teach directly — you mostly learn it by having plans disrupted and discovering you survived. What adults can do is model it: reacting calmly when something falls through teaches a child far more than telling them to be adaptable. The risk of raising a very rigid child is that they interpret every disruption as a disaster.
Are older people less willing to change their plans?
There's something to it, but I'd put it down to circumstances rather than age itself. Older people often have more commitments that can't easily move, and they've usually built routines that work, so changing one has knock-on effects. Younger people's plans tend to be cheaper to abandon. I don't think it's really about willingness.
How do businesses cope when their plans fail?
The ones that cope well tend to have thought about failure in advance — contingency plans, spare capacity, more than one supplier. That costs money in good times, which is why a lot of companies skip it and then find themselves improvising during a crisis. The pandemic was a fairly brutal demonstration of which businesses had done that thinking and which hadn't.
Is it possible to plan for everything?
No, and trying is usually counterproductive — you spend so long on contingencies that you never start. What you can plan for is the category of problem rather than the specific one: knowing you have some financial slack, or that someone else can cover for you, handles a wide range of disruptions without your having predicted any of them.
Useful vocabulary
| Word / phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| to fall through | to fail to happen as arranged |
| at short notice | with very little warning |
| a contingency plan | a backup plan for if things go wrong |
| to rearrange | to organise something for a different time |
| a knock-on effect | an indirect consequence of a change |
| non-refundable | cannot be paid back if cancelled |
| to make the best of it | to accept a bad situation and cope well |
| with hindsight | looking back, knowing how it turned out |
| to hold something loosely | not to be rigid about a plan |
| to take the pressure off | to reduce stress on someone |
More cue cards
Describe a Time You Were Late
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