Journal · Practical
The Case for Taking a City Out
A one-night stop gives you five usable hours, two of them dinner. Here is the arithmetic behind the advice nobody wants to hear, and the short list of places that do work in a night.
Almost every itinerary we are sent to improve has one stop too many. It usually arrives as a fortnight with nine hotels in it, most of them for a single night. The traveller has done the arithmetic — fourteen days, nine places, seems efficient — without doing the other arithmetic, which is how many of those days are actually spent in a car with the bags in the back.
Here is the maths. A one-night stop costs you the afternoon you arrive and the morning you leave. Check-out is at eleven, the drive is five hours, you reach the next hotel at four, tired, and the light has gone. Of twenty-four hours in a place, perhaps five are usable. Two of those are dinner. The one-night stop is not a stop. It is a corridor.
Three nights is where a place starts to behave differently. The first evening you are still arriving. The second morning you know where the coffee is and which way the market runs. By the third you have a favourite bench, the man at the paan shop nods, and your guide has stopped explaining and started arguing with you about the Emergency or the cricket. That is the trip people remember.
The objection is always the same: we may never come back. We understand it, and we do not entirely believe it — about a third of our guests return within four years, usually to a region they skipped. But even taken at face value, the argument cuts the other way. If you will see India once, would you rather have seen eleven places dimly or six of them properly?
There are places that genuinely work in a night. Agra, if you arrive at four, see the Taj at sunset from Mehtab Bagh across the river and go in at opening the next morning. Ranakpur. Bandipur, on the road from Kathmandu to Pokhara. What these have in common is one thing to do, done at a particular hour, with the drive on either side kept under four hours.
So when we send back a draft with Khajuraho removed, it is not laziness and it is not us trimming costs — the shorter itinerary usually costs the same, because the nights go into better rooms. It is a judgement about what you will be like on day nine. Argue with us. We keep the cut stop in a footnote, and roughly one guest in five puts it back.
