Your tour is overloaded: what the corrected variant proposes

An overloaded tour is recognisable by eye: too many bases, nights that follow one another without a breather, a road day that eats the visit. Correcting it by hand takes experience, and above all an overview that a twenty-day programme does not give at a glance. The corrected variant is there to complete that review: it shows what the same tour would be as the engine would do it, and it lists what differs. The decision stays with you.

To know whether a tour is overloaded, see Is your itinerary too packed?; for the place of the variant in the report, see Reading a feasibility check.

The principle

The engine does not start from a blank page. The tour you supply is treated as a precise request:

• your stages are imposed, in the order you gave;
• your nights are a request that the engine may redistribute, and it says so in the “nights” gap;
• your dates, your duration and your arrival and departure gateways are kept: if the duration had to differ, the “duration” gap says so.

Under these constraints, the engine builds what it would do with the same tour: it can add a stage, redistribute nights, measure each journey again on the real road network. Then it keeps only the difference.

Each gap with its values before and after

The variant is a list of gaps, not a new programme to reread from scratch. There are nine kinds, with their real wording:

• duration: “duration: X → Y days”;
• a removed stage: “Name: removed”, followed by the reason (out of reach, not placed, absent from the engine's plan, or merged with a revisit);
• an added stage: “Name: added (n night(s))”;
• nights: “Name: a → b night(s)”;
• reordered stages, if the order had to change;
• mode of transport: “Name: reached by X instead of Y”;
• the road: “worst day … h → … h, average … h → … h”;
• days without a programme: “a → b”;
• season: the risk of the stage.

Only the removed stage carries a reason. The other gaps are given with their values before and after: it is for you to judge whether they suit you. An imposed stage is never absorbed in silence: if the engine cannot keep it, it comes out as a gap, with its reason. If the imposed order costs road time, the “route” gap shows it.

An example: a tour of Japan, twenty-four days

The example comes from a tour in the GuardTrails corpus, replayed by the engine in our trials: thirteen stages over twenty-four days, from Nikkō (Lake Chūzenji) to the sacred sites of the Kii peninsula (Kōya, Yoshino, Nachi). It is not an operator's tour.

What the engine kept. The thirteen stages, the order supplied and the client's duration. The variant changes no stage and no night.

The gaps listed.

• The road. The worst day stays at 5.6 h; the average goes from 1.7 to 1.5 h.
• Days without a programme. From “none” to 0.
• Season. The risks listed by stage: rains or typhoons that can close trails, storms at altitude, summer crowds.

What the variant does not settle. The check report for the same tour flags separately heat of 30 to 34 °C on seven stages and two nights with no stated bed. The variant does not erase them: they are points to check with you, not faults the engine can correct alone.

When nights move: an honest example

On a fifteen-day tour of the south-west coast of Portugal, the variant redistributes the nights: “Rio Mira: 1 → 3 night(s)” and “Praia de Odeceixe-Mar: 2 → 3 night(s)”. In the same report, other stages lose nights, down to zero: that is the meaning of “your nights are a request that the engine may redistribute”. It is for you to judge whether this new balance suits.

The “route” gap is given plainly: the worst day goes from 2.0 to 2.2 h and the average from 0.4 to 0.9 h. The variant does not always improve the road; it says what it does, and you decide whether the trade-off is worth it.

The expert's place

A variant is never delivered as it stands. You read it gap by gap:

• you accept what looks right to you;
• you refuse what you know to be wrong, because you know the place, the client or the ground handler;
• you adjust: a night moved, a stage kept or not.

Each gap is stated on its own: refusing one does not oblige you to refuse the others. The engine completes, the expert decides.

What the variant does not do

• It does not verify facts: a stage can be closed, a road cut, a place wrongly named; the engine does not know.
• It says nothing about visas or formalities.
• It does not know ferry, opening or crossing timetables; it detects that a constraint exists, never whether it suits your date.
• It books nothing and checks no availability.
• It does not count as a validated tour. It is a proposal from the engine; the expert decides.
• It does not replace your knowledge of the ground. It sees what you cannot see on paper: the accumulation of journeys, the nights too many or too few. It does not see what you know without having written it down.
• It does not keep your tour. It stays confidential, neither kept in a catalogue nor published.

What we do not know

The variant is a proposal from the engine, not the right answer: another rhythm would be defensible. The thresholds it applies are parameters, set for each case, not rules. It rests on the assumptions the report writes down (end date, arrival and departure gateways): if one is wrong, the variant changes. Finally, the examples are two cases: they do not say what another tour would give.

To have one of your tours run through it

Fill in the beta form on /pro and tick “Check an existing circuit”. We are the ones who run the tour through the engine; the confidential report contains the corrected variant. For the place of this check in your profession: For your profession and ground handlers and operators. The shape of a tour, its rhythm and its nights are the subject of A tour is not a list of places.

Corrected variant: description of the service, in beta. Examples: tours from the GuardTrails corpus, engine trial.

A gap looks wrong to you? Write to us: corrections are published.