10 Mistakes That Make European Vacations Exhausting

Nobody plans an exhausting trip. They plan an ambitious one, and the two turn out to be the same thing.

None of what follows is dramatic. They're small, reasonable-sounding decisions that compound until the holiday you spent a great deal of money on is one you need a holiday to recover from.

1. Counting days instead of counting nights

"We have ten days in Italy" usually means eight. The arrival day is gone to a red-eye and a hotel that won't let you in until three. The departure day is a morning. Plan in nights, not days, and the itinerary stops lying to you before you've even started.

2. Treating a train as a quick hop

The train from Rome to Florence takes an hour and a half. The day takes five. Checkout, the walk to the station you underestimated, the platform announced eight minutes before departure, the taxi at the other end, the room that isn't ready. Every hotel change is a half day, regardless of how fast the train is.

3. Booking a timed ticket on a travel day

The Uffizi at 4pm on the afternoon you arrive in Florence sounds efficient. It means the entire day is hostage to one train, and the ticket is non-refundable. Leave arrival afternoons empty. They fill themselves.

4. Choosing hotels by star rating instead of location

In most European cities the neighborhood is the experience. A five-star hotel a twenty-minute taxi from anywhere you want to be will make the trip worse than a good three-star you can walk home to after dinner. Ask where a hotel is before you ask what it has.

5. Scheduling two major sights in one day

The Vatican Museums are three to four hours and they take something out of you. So does the Louvre, the Prado, the Uffizi. One per day. The second one is where you stop seeing anything and start walking through rooms.

6. Fighting the local clock

In Spain, lunch is the main meal and dinner starts around nine. In Italy, most kitchens don't open before half past seven. Trying to eat on an American schedule means eating badly at the wrong hours in the wrong places, and then being hungry at midnight. Move your day, not theirs.

7. Renting a car you'll spend the trip regretting

Historic centers across Italy are restricted-traffic zones with cameras and fines that arrive by post months later. Parking in most old cities is genuinely difficult. A car earns its place in the countryside and almost nowhere else. Pick it up when you leave the city, drop it before you reach the next one.

8. Putting the most demanding day first

Jet lag lands hardest on day two and three, not day one. If the hardest walking day, the earliest start, or the emotionally heavy visit is scheduled then, it will be remembered as harder than it was. Front-load the easy days.

9. Leaving no unscheduled afternoons

This is the one that separates good trips from great ones. When people describe the trip afterwards, they describe the market they wandered into, the lunch that ran three hours, the town they'd never heard of. Those need a hole in the schedule to happen in. If every afternoon is spoken for, you've booked a tour of Europe rather than a visit to it.

10. Adding one more place

Almost every itinerary I'm shown has one stop too many, and almost always the person already suspects it. Removing it doesn't leave you with less to do. It gives you back the days in items 8 and 9; and those are the days people talk about at home.

The one rule underneath all of them

No more than one hotel change every three nights.

That single constraint prevents about six of the ten above, because it forces the itinerary to be honest about travel days before you've committed money to it.

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If you've got a draft itinerary and can't tell whether it's ambitious or unrealistic, that's the most common thing I'm asked. Send it over; telling you which it is takes about five minutes, and there's no charge for it.