Build a realistic day-by-day itinerary that survives contact with actual travel time
Get a plan that accounts for how long things actually take, not a list of everything worth seeing.
- Use it for
- Anyone planning a trip who's ended up with an itinerary that looked great on paper.
The default travel itinerary is a list of everything worth seeing, arranged by geographic proximity, with no real accounting for how long anything actually takes — transit between neighborhoods, lines, meals, the simple fact that people get tired and slow down by the afternoon. It looks complete on paper and falls apart on day one, when the first three "quick stops" eat the whole morning and everything after gets rushed or cut. A good itinerary isn't a longer list, it's a shorter one that actually accounts for time.
This prompt asks for the realistic version from the start — including the version that names what to cut, rather than one that pretends everything fits.
When not to use this
For a trip where you genuinely want to wander without a plan, this is the wrong tool by design — it optimizes for a workable schedule, which isn't what unstructured travel needs. Use it when you have specific things you want to see and limited time to do it in.
Did this work?
You could actually do every day of this itinerary as written, including the travel between stops, and end each day tired in a good way instead of having skipped half of it.
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.