How to Plan a Trip You Will Not Need to Recover From

You know the feeling: back on Sunday night, more tired than when you left, quietly wondering what happened to the rest. It is nearly always a planning problem — specifically, planning a trip as though the goal were coverage.

The mistakes that cause it

Too many bases

Every change of accommodation costs you most of a day: packing, checking out, moving, finding the new place, working out where things are. Three cities in seven days is two days of logistics dressed up as sightseeing. Two bases in a week is usually the ceiling.

Booking the extremes of the day

The 6am flight out and the late flight back look efficient on a spreadsheet. In practice the early one costs you the night before, and the late one costs you the whole final day plus the following morning.

One-thing-per-day inflation

You plan one major activity per day. Then each one has a queue, a transfer and a meal attached, and the day is full. Plan one major thing per day and nothing else — the rest will fill itself.

What to do instead

• Arrive with a buffer. Do not schedule anything for the first afternoon. Walk around the neighbourhood, find a coffee, work out where the supermarket is.
• Book one anchor per day, in the morning. Mornings are when queues are short and you still have energy. Afternoons stay open.
• Keep one day completely empty. It will become the best day of the trip roughly half the time.
• Come home a day early. A day at home before work is worth more than an extra day away. This is the single change with the biggest effect.

The test

Look at your itinerary and ask what happens if one thing goes wrong — a delayed train, a closure, bad weather. If the answer is that the rest of the trip collapses, it is over-planned. A good itinerary absorbs a bad day without anyone having to rescue it.

Fewer places, longer in each, and one empty day. That is most of it.