What to check in your itinerary before you book

Treat every suggestion as a draft

A named restaurant, a plausible travel time and a confident instruction to book are not evidence of anything. Places close for refurbishment. Boats stop running in October. Opening hours change for the season, and half the internet is quoting last year's.

Check each one on the venue's own site, for your dates. Not the aggregator, not the article, the place itself.

Check the route door to door

Read the day in order and follow it on a map. You are looking for two things: backtracking, and connections that do not exist.

Backtracking is the quiet time killer. Two stops at opposite ends of a city on the same afternoon, with lunch back in the middle, can cost you two hours you never notice on paper.

Connections are the loud one. A suggested journey is not proof that a bus, ferry or train runs on your date, at that time, in that direction. Check the operator's timetable for the actual day, especially on Sundays and public holidays.

Check the booking chain

For anything timed, confirm four things: where you meet, how early you have to be there, how long it lasts, and what happens if you cancel.

Then check the pieces fit. A boat that returns at 5.30 and a restaurant that holds your table until 6 is not a plan, it is a sprint with luggage. If two timed things sit back to back, one of them needs to move.

Check it against your trip, not a generic one

Put your own bookings into the plan before you judge it. Where you are actually sleeping, what you already paid for, when you have to be at the airport.

Then cut anything that does not match how you travel. If you do not like early starts, a 7am viewpoint is not a plan, it is an argument on holiday. If someone in the group cannot manage stepped streets in August, that route needs to change now, not on the day.

The quickest version of this check

If you only do four things, do these.

• Open every venue's own site and confirm the day and the hours.
• Follow the day on a map and look for backtracking.
• Check one real timetable for every journey that is not walking.
• Count the timed bookings. More than two in a day is usually one too many.

That is about 40 minutes of work and it catches most of what goes wrong.