Pacing: The Hidden Variable in Itinerary Personalization

The note came in after a four-day trip in northern New Mexico: “Every single thing was wonderful. We were wrecked by Wednesday.”

The operator had personalized the content perfectly. The couple, in their mid-sixties and from the coast, loved textiles, food and dense museums, and the itinerary was full of all three. What it didn’t account for was what each day cost them. The content was right. The pacing was wrong.

Most personalization work goes into choosing activities. Much less goes into pacing, which is how those activities add up into days a particular person can enjoy. This piece sets out the model we use to make pacing explicit, works through that four-day trip with numbers, and closes with a review you can run on your own itineraries.

Why “relaxed, moderate, active” doesn’t work

Most booking forms reduce pace to a single dial. That dial mixes up at least five different things. A traveler who happily walks ten miles may dread three hotel changes in a week. A traveler who loves a 6:00 AM start may wilt at a hosted dinner with strangers. “Moderate” describes neither of them.

A single label also hides the most important fact about pace, which is that it accumulates. A hard Tuesday doesn’t stay on Tuesday. It turns up on Wednesday as a skipped activity and a short temper.

The energy budget model

Five costs, scored separately

Score each activity from 0 to 5 on five dimensions. Your guides can do this in an afternoon.

Dimension	What it captures	Anchor examples
Physical	Exertion, climbing, rough ground, heat	1 = level stroll under a mile · 3 = three miles with some climbing · 5 = long climb on rough ground
Clock	How far the day reaches outside normal waking hours	1 = ends after 9:30 PM · 3 = starts before 7:30 AM · 5 = starts before 6:45 AM
Transition	Changes of place, counted additively	1 per vehicle leg over 30 minutes · 1 per check-in or check-out · 4 per flight
Cognitive	Density of information, navigation, language effort	1 = light gallery browse · 3 = two-hour guided tour · 4 = dense museum
Social	Hosted or group intensity	1 = small shared table · 3 = hosted dinner or group class · 5 = a full day with a large group

Weights, budgets and three rules

Each traveler profile carries a weight per dimension, typically between 0.5 and 2.0, and a daily budget. We start most profiles at 16, 20 or 26 points and calibrate from there. A day’s cost is the weighted sum of its activities, plus three rules:

1. Recovery block. Every day needs at least one unstructured block of 90 minutes between late morning and dinner. A day without one carries a 3-point surcharge.
2. Carryover. Half of any overspend comes off the next day’s budget. Exceed by 6 today and tomorrow’s 20 becomes 17.
3. Altitude. Santa Fe sits at roughly 7,000 feet. For travelers arriving from near sea level, physical costs are multiplied by 1.25 for the first 48 hours. This is a planning heuristic, not medical guidance.

A worked example: four days in the high desert

Our couple’s profile has a budget of 20 points per day. Their weights are physical 1.0, clock 1.5 (they dislike early starts), transition 1.5 (they dislike being in vehicles), cognitive 0.75 (dense museums energize them) and social 1.0.

Here is the original day two, line by line:

Item	Raw scores	Weighted cost
Balloon flight, meet at 6:40 AM	Clock 5, physical 1	7.5 + 1.25 = 8.75
Museum, two hours	Cognitive 4	3.0
Four-mile mesa-top hike, 45-minute drive each way	Physical 4, transition 2	5.0 + 3.0 = 8.0
Cooking class with dinner	Social 3, cognitive 1	3.0 + 0.75 = 3.75
No unstructured block	Surcharge	3.0
Total		26.5 against a budget of 19.4

The budget is 19.4 rather than 20 because day one ran slightly over. Now the whole trip, as sold and as re-paced, using the same activities:

Day	As sold	Cost / budget	Re-paced	Cost / budget
1	Flight and transfer, walking tour, hosted dinner	21.3 / 20.0	Flight and transfer, free afternoon, hosted dinner	13.5 / 20
2	Balloon at 6:40 AM, museum, mesa hike, cooking class	26.5 / 19.4	Walking tour, gallery walk, museum, free late afternoon, cooking class	14.3 / 20
3	High-road loop, cliff dwelling with ladders, weaving studio	19.3 / 16.4	Balloon at 6:40 AM, long midday rest, late-afternoon mesa hike	15.5 / 20
4	Gallery walk, hot springs	2.5 / 18.6	High-road loop, cliff dwelling, weaving studio, hot springs	16.3 / 20

Four things stand out.

The trip wasn’t too full. As sold, it used 69.5 points of energy against a nominal 80 available. It was badly shaped. Day two overspent by seven points, which took more than three and a half points off day three. Day three then overspent its reduced budget too.

Altitude made the hardest day harder. The hike and the balloon flight both landed inside the first 48 hours, when physical effort cost a quarter more.

Slack at the end is worth nothing. Day four had 16 unspent points. Energy can’t be spent backward, so a light final day doesn’t rescue a crushing second day.

The re-paced version is lighter without losing anything. It cost 59.5 points, about 10 fewer than the original. Nine of those came from giving every day a recovery block and one from moving the hike past the altitude window. Each day stays under budget, and the curve rises gently (13.5, 14.3, 15.5, 16.3) as the travelers adjust. Day five is a departure morning with nothing planned.

Not one activity was cut. Moving activities between days changed the experience more than replacing them would have.

Shape rules that hold up

Across many trips, a handful of rules account for most of the improvement:

• Build up gradually at altitude. Put the strenuous days third and fourth, not first and second.
• Never put two early starts back to back for a traveler whose clock weight is above 1.
• Count transitions as carefully as hikes. For many travelers a hotel change costs more than a climb, which is why multi-base trips feel more tiring than their activity lists suggest.
• Protect the recovery block. For gentle profiles, make it a hard constraint rather than a penalty.
• Put slack before the hardest day, not after it. A light day two makes a big day three possible.
• Keep departure days trivially droppable. Anything scheduled on the last morning should be something a traveler can skip without regret.

Capturing pace without a questionnaire

Before the trip: compare two days

Questionnaires about pace produce optimistic answers. Comparisons produce honest ones. Show the traveler two sample days with the same content, one compact and one spread out with a long midday break, and ask which sounds better. Their choice, and how quickly they make it, tells you more than any slider. Add one question about their best previous trip (“What did a typical afternoon look like?”), and listen for phrases like “we loved having nothing planned after lunch.”

During the trip: recalibrate

The trip itself is the best calibration data you will get. Late breakfast requests, skipped optional activities and messages asking to push a start time back are all pacing signals. An in-trip assistant such as a travel concierge can notice them and suggest adjustments to the remaining days’ budgets for a staff member to approve. Nothing should change for the traveler without that approval.

Treat it as sensitive data

Pacing preferences can come close to health information. “We need a rest every afternoon” might reflect a medical condition, and the system should never try to find out which. Store pacing as a planning preference the traveler can see and edit, not as an inferred diagnosis. Collect only what planning needs, and say plainly what it’s used for. Our responsible AI and traveler data governance work treats pacing data as a sensitive category from the first day for exactly this reason.

Putting the budget into the plan

An energy budget is only useful if the routing respects it. In Nova’s Route Engine, each day’s budget is a soft constraint with a steep penalty above 100% and a hard cap at 115% for gentle profiles. The recovery block can be marked as hard. Carryover links the days, so the solver can’t fix Tuesday by quietly breaking Wednesday.

Advisors see the result as an energy curve on the proposal, next to the timings, in the same itinerary workflow they already use. It gives them a fast way to see that a trip is lopsided, and a vocabulary to explain to travelers why the balloon flight sits on day three.

Pacing overlaps naturally with accessibility. A traveler using a cane and a traveler recovering from jet lag both need protected recovery blocks and fewer transitions. That’s why our accessible travel planning work and our pacing model share the same data. For outdoor and adventure operators, the physical dimension needs finer scores, calibrated against guide judgment, but the structure is the same.

A pacing review you can run this week

Pick five recent itineraries and, for each day, check:

1. Transitions. Count the vehicle legs over 30 minutes, plus check-ins and check-outs. Flag any day with four or more.
2. Early starts. Flag any two consecutive days that start before 7:30 AM.
3. Recovery. Is there a 90-minute unstructured block between late morning and dinner? If not, flag it.
4. Altitude. Are the most strenuous activities in the first 48 hours? Flag them.
5. Shape. Rank the days from hardest to easiest. If the hardest day comes before the lightest, ask whether swapping them would cost anything.

Most teams find at least one lopsided trip in five. Fixing it rarely means removing anything. It usually means moving one activity, which is the cheapest change in travel.