How to plan a multi-city trip

A train from Florence to Rome takes a morning. A flight from Amsterdam to Copenhagen eats most of a day once you count the airports. With eight nights, two bases of four is a trip. Four bases of two is packing, unpacking, and a lot of receipts.

Open-jaw flights — into the first city, out of the last — earn their keep whenever the backtrack would cost you a day. Florence then Rome is the classic version: you fly home from Rome and the bags stay where they are.

If one city only gets two nights, make them consecutive and park the bags. A single night dropped into the middle of a longer stay so you can say you saw the place is how people end up remembering train stations.

Check how many days each city wants before you add a third pin. Ten days in Europe is the worked version of two bases. Stitching two week-long templates together means dropping days from both, and the days you drop are usually the good ones.

Four nights in Florence, a train in the morning, three nights in Rome, and a flight home from Rome, which is what open-jaw tickets are for. The train day leaves you an afternoon, so keep the museums off it. Book the first night in each place ahead of the rest, put the timed entries on the calendar, and let the trattorias wait until you are standing outside them.

Adding Venice for two nights in between is how the week turns into platforms, so make a third city a day trip from one of your bases and keep the suitcase shut. Florence and Rome already fill the days you have.

Three works when one of them is a single night on the way to the airport, when the hop is a morning train, and when you have ten nights or more, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. Two cities plus a day trip is usually the better version of "three cities."

A flight hop like Amsterdam to Copenhagen costs a full day, so put it on the calendar as one. If the remaining nights drop below three in each base, cut a city, because you came here to be somewhere.

The travel day itself deserves a small plan: a late lunch near the station, a walk, and an early dinner close to the new hotel. Aim to be somewhere pleasant by six, though be honest with yourself that the day was mostly transit.

Two more things. Trains beat short flights on anything under four hours once the airport is counted, and the arrival night in each city is the booking to make first. Ten days in Europe is the longer worked pairing.