How many days do you actually need in a city?

It's the first question in every trip group chat, and it always gets the same non-answer: "depends what you want to see." Unhelpful. After a decade of planning trips for myself and, later, for other people, I've landed on a piece of arithmetic that settles it in about thirty seconds. It has rarely steered me wrong.

First, subtract the edges

Whatever you think you have, you have less. Arrival day starts at 14:00 — check-in, unpack, breathe — and really gets going around 17:30. The last morning is checkout, a final coffee, and the road to the airport. So a three-day trip is not three days. It's one evening, one full day, and one morning. Count in usable blocks, not hotel nights, and the whole conversation changes.

This is why the difference between two days and three days is enormous, while the difference between six and seven barely registers. You're not adding a day to a pile — you're adding it to a small number of real blocks.

The rule of one anchor per block

• One anchor per half-day block. If the anchors outnumber the blocks, the trip is too short, not too long.
• Beyond four or five anchors, stop counting. The rest of any city is discovered on foot, not scheduled in advance.
• A day with zero anchors is not a wasted day. It's the one you'll actually relax on.

So what's the answer?

For most mid-sized cities, three to four days is the honest answer — enough for the anchors, one unhurried loop per neighborhood, and the slow evening hours that turn a visit into a memory. Two days works if you accept that you're choosing depth over coverage. A week suits capitals and regions with day trips, not cities with everything crammed in.

The people who love their trips most, in my experience, are never the ones who stayed longest. They're the ones who counted in real blocks, matched the days to the anchors, and gave themselves a first evening that actually felt like arriving rather than surviving.