City break day planner: what actually fits into one day
You pick a city, a time window and the sights that matter to you. The planner puts them in an order, counts the time between them, drops in the lunch break and tells you what is left over at the end. The mistake in almost every home-made day plan is the same one: you add up the time inside the museums and forget the ground between them. Six sights of an hour each are not six hours, they are eight. Those two hours are exactly what the planner makes visible, before you lose them on the street.
City and time window
What you want to see
How the day looks
Pick some sights on the left and the running order appears here.
Does not fit today
The time per sight and the quarter each one belongs to are editorial estimates as of September 2026. They come from our own visits and from the times given in our city guides, not from the operators. Queues at the entrance, opening hours and closing days are not included.
How the time between two sights is worked out
| Situation | On foot | Mixed | Transport |
|---|---|---|---|
| Both sights in the same quarter | 10 min | 10 min | 10 min |
| Moving to another quarter | 30 min | 25 min | 20 min |
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Your plan stays in the browser: the planner works locally, loads nothing and stores nothing.
How the running order is decided
The planner sorts your selection by quarter. Everything we have assigned to the same quarter is done in one go, and the quarters themselves keep the order they have in our city list. That list is not alphabetical: it is built the way we would walk the city, from the ancient centre of Rome through the old town to the Vatican, and only then across the river to Trastevere. This is deliberately a simple method and not real route optimisation. Real optimisation would need coordinates, streets and timetables, which means a connection to the outside world. The planner has none. What the grouping does reliably is the part that matters most: it stops you crossing the city three times a day because the sights were being worked through in the order you happened to tick them. Inside a quarter the order of our list stays. If you want a different one, take the plan as a frame and swap two stops in your head. The total barely moves, because every walk inside a quarter is counted the same way anyway.
How the time between stops is counted
Two sights in the same quarter: 10 minutes on foot, whatever you have chosen under getting around. Inside an old town you are faster walking than you are finding the next station. Moving to another quarter: 30 minutes on foot, 25 minutes mixed, 20 minutes by public transport. Those 20 minutes are not a timetable figure. They are the honest sum of walking to the station, waiting, riding and walking again at the far end. Anyone who has changed between two lines in Paris knows why we do not count twelve. The pace setting affects the sights only, not the moves. Relaxed means 25 per cent more time on site, brisk means 20 per cent less. A museum can be walked through faster; a metro ride cannot. The lunch break goes to the sight boundary closest to midday. The planner does not cut a visit in half, it pushes the break to the next clean handover. Enter zero minutes and there is no block of its own, which means you eat on the move.
Where the time per sight comes from
The minutes and the quarter each sight belongs to are editorial estimates as of September 2026. They come from our own visits and from the times given in our city guides. They are not operator figures, not official visit lengths and not a guarantee. What is meant is always the time on site from the moment you are inside: 90 minutes for the Colosseum means 90 minutes in the Colosseum, not 90 minutes including the queue. Waiting at the entrance is in none of these numbers, because at one and the same gate it swings between zero and ninety minutes depending on the weekday, the hour and whether a cruise ship is in port. If you look at things very thoroughly, the big museums will easily take twice as long. We put the Louvre at 150 minutes, and that is the version with a plan and a direction, not the one with every room. That is what the pace setting is for: switch to relaxed and every value grows by a quarter. Sights marked "book ahead" are the ones where a time slot bought online saves the day. The planner lists them again under the result.
What the planner cannot do
It does not know the queue on your day. No tool without a network connection can, and with one the number would still be a guess. At the big houses without a pre-booked time slot, add 30 to 60 minutes on top. It knows no opening hours and no closing days. If the plan hands you a museum at 17:30 and it shuts at 17:00, it says nothing. Check the times of the two or three stops your day hangs on before you book, and check Monday in particular: in Paris, Rome and Florence a striking amount is closed on Mondays. It books nothing and reserves nothing. It is a calculation, not a ticket shop. The links on this page that lead to providers are marked as advertising. It stores nothing. No account, no cookies, no local storage, no network request. Close the tab and the plan is gone, so write it down or print the page. And it knows nothing about you. Whether you are travelling with a child, whether the August heat makes the middle of the day useless, whether you still want dinner out: you decide all of that by setting the finish, the pace and the break differently.