Is your itinerary too packed?

A programme is too packed when you can show it, not when you feel it. Four counts are enough, and none of them is on the quotation.

1. Nights per zone

Count nights by zone visited, not by bed. On itineraries of two to four weeks sold by different operators, we found a different lodging about every day and a half. What matters is what that number becomes once recounted by zone, and whether the changes are imposed or chosen. How many hotels for a road trip sets out this count, and stage or lodging gives the definition.

2. Stops that look alike

Read the description of each stop of a single day. If you can swap them without the text changing, the stop is interchangeable too. On the weakest day of our Baltic tour, three medieval towns followed one another with three descriptions sharing the same skeleton, almost sentence for sentence: that is the subject of the Baltics repeat themselves. The method term is register saturation: the unrequested repetition of one kind of experience.

The word that matters is “unrequested”. If sand and pines are exactly why you came, two sand spits saturate nothing.

3. Full days in a row

Count consecutive full days. Any run of more than seven is a signal: something is missing at that point of the programme. Where to put the day with no plan explains how many to plan and where to put them, and day with no plan gives the definition.

4. The share of culture and nature

Count nights in town and nights in nature separately, then compare with what you asked for. A tour asked for at 70% nature and 30% culture delivered 40 to 45% culture, counted in nights. On the itineraries sold in our corpus, the gap always went the same way; the itinerary we had built ourselves landed on the profile asked for. Eleven hotels in twenty nights sets out these counts.

What to do with the result

A count is not a verdict: it tells you where to look. A run of full days that is too long is corrected by moving nights already paid for, not by adding more. To see what the engine proposes for an overloaded tour, see the corrected variant; to read the report that contains it, Reading a feasibility check.

Two ways forward.

• You have a programme to check. Describe it or paste a link: we do these four counts for free. Have an itinerary reviewed.
• You are an operator, a software vendor or a destination body. These measures of rhythm and coverage are the ones our engine calculates, and that an API can apply to existing itineraries. The engine, demo and API. The shape and rhythm of a tour are set out in A tour is not a list of places.

In the itineraries we calculate, nights per stage, days with no plan and the share of culture and nature are part of the calculation. Early access.

To see what two weeks by car look like when the pace is calculated: northwest Scotland in fourteen days.

What we do not know

The thresholds cited, such as more than seven full days in a row, are parameters of the engine, set per traveller, not rules: yours may sit elsewhere, and the engine takes it into account.

Counting stops that look alike depends on how finely the descriptions are written: three baroque churches look alike to a generalist and not at all to an enthusiast.

Finally, a trip recollection detects excesses, never gaps. These benchmarks are probably too cautious.

Counts and observations from itineraries of two to four weeks between 2017 and 2026.

A figure looks wrong to you, or your own logs say something else? Write to us — corrections are published.