Planning
The forty-tab trip
Planning a good trip has quietly become a research project. Here is why it is exhausting, and what a plan should do instead.
Elena Marsh, Co-founder and CEO · June 26, 2026 · 6 minute read
You know the tabs. A ranked list of the ten best things to do. A thread arguing about which of them is a trap. A map you are trying to hold in your head. A blog from 2019 with one perfect recommendation buried in the middle. By the time you have twenty tabs open you are not planning a trip, you are doing homework, and the trip has not even started.
The strange thing is that all the information is there. The problem was never a lack of options. The problem is that turning a pile of options into a plan, one that fits your days, your pace and what you actually like, is real work, and every tool leaves that work to you.
- 40+
- tabs open to plan one week-long trip
- 10 hrs
- spent researching a single trip
- 1 in 3
- say planning is the most stressful part
A list is not a plan
A top-ten list tells you what exists. It does not tell you that two of those things are on opposite sides of the city, that the third is closed on Mondays, or that doing all ten in five days would leave you exhausted by Wednesday. The list is the easy part. The plan, the order, the pacing, the grouping, the honest cut of what to skip, is the part that actually takes time.
The information was never the bottleneck. Turning it into a plan that fits you is.
Elena Marsh
What a plan should do
A good plan does the work the tabs leave undone. It puts things that are near each other on the same day, so you are in places rather than in transit. It respects your pace, so a slow traveler is not marched through six sights before lunch. It matches what you like, so a food-and-views trip does not read like a museum crawl. And it is honest, telling you what is worth it and what to skip, because a plan you cannot trust is just another tab.
- Groups each day into one walkable area, not a scavenger hunt across the map.
- Paces the day to how you actually travel, with room to breathe.
- Leans toward what you love instead of a generic greatest-hits list.
- Says what is worth it and what to skip, in a real voice.
None of this replaces the joy of stumbling onto something not on the plan. That is the best part of travel and no tool should try to own it. A good plan just clears the busywork out of the way so there is room for it.