Travel Routine in a New City: The First 48 Hours

I follow a set of specific rules for my first 48 hours in a new city. This allows me to get settled in while still seeing as much as possible of my new surroundings. I detail these below for your information. In essence, after the first 12 hours of arriving in a new place, you should aim to orientate yourself with your immediate surroundings, and then go on to complete a longer ‘orientation walk’ a day or so later, followed by your first ‘effort’ activity, and then your first major ‘highlight’ activity – all within the space of 48 hours.

Hour 0 to 12: arrival logistics only

Within the first 12 hours of your arrival, you need to take care of all arrival business. This typically includes going straight to your hotel from the airport. Don’t even think about taking a bag to some location for sightseeing. Upon arriving at your hotel, get cleaned up, put on some fresh clothes and take a short stroll around the immediate area of your hotel. This will allow your body to get acclimated to your new location as well as get you familiar with the area right around your hotel. After that, go out and get a meal at some casual restaurant right near your hotel. It is only after 3 days when you can have a fancy dinner at a high-end restaurant. Arrival type business such as this is not something that you typically find in a travel guide but it is here so that you can plan a quality trip.

Hour 12 to 24: orientation walk

During the first morning, go for a 2- to 3-hour walk through your new neighborhood and any other area nearby. It does not need to include all of the major tourist sites that you want to visit on your trip. The purpose is to get to know your way around a little better and how different locations in the city relate to each other. Pick out a few parks or squares that are nice for local people to hang out in. Find a couple of local streets that have the type of businesses that you would normally expect to find outside of a highly-touristed area. Do not enter too many different stores or cafes along the way, but when you come across one that seems to be crowded with people who appear to be from the local area, stop for a little while and take a rest. Pick out a spot in the cafe to sit down for an hour or so where you can watch the people around you. Read a book during your break. You will be able to tell whether or not you are moving at a pace that seems to fit in with the local culture and you will begin to feel more acclimated to being in the location. The length of your walk and the choice of the different locations that you visit during it will need to be based on your individual trip. As a result, there is not one fixed set of guidelines that can be provided. Instead, you should make use of the basic strategy that is outlined above and then try to adapt it to suit your personal preferences and the goals of your vacation.

Hour 24 to 36: first medium-effort activity

When returning to your hotel in the afternoon of the second day of your trip you can start to really get to know a city. On the road a good destination for your first “medium-effort activity” are so-called neighborhood destinations. These are places of interest that can be found in a neighborhood and that are bigger than what you can see on a walk through a neighborhood but certainly not as big or as complex as the so-called headline-attractions. On such a medium-effort activity you can expect to spend a few hours and in the evening you can have dinner at a slightly more deliberate restaurant in the area where you have been during the day.

Even myself in 2024 and 2026 the pattern holds.

Hour 36 to 48: first headline activity

After you’ve spent the evening of the second day doing something half-way strenuous, you can begin to indulge in the big tourist attractions. The reason is that after 2 nights in a city you’ll have managed to get your bearings, you’ll know where you’re staying, and you’ll have enough energy to appreciate the experience. This is the time to spend money on tours, famous museums and the longest of dinner reservations. They’ll be far more enjoyable as you’ll have a sense of where you are and be able to remember them long after the trip is over.

What this approach prevents

There are several common mistakes people make in the first 48 hours of travel that this strategy will avoid. The first is the “jet-lag tour” in which, half asleep and half bored, you wander around a big museum or gallery and remember nothing about it when you get home. The worst part of this is that you have then wasted a reservation at a famous or otherwise highlights restaurant. Travelers also burn out early in their trip when they pack too much in during the first couple of days and then have nothing left for the rest of the time. This is far more common than one might suppose.

Practical takeaways for your next trip

Test new travel gear and travel approaches on your shorter trips first. What works for a weekend trip may not work as well for a week or more long trip and you do not want to discover that on your trip. Make a personal checklist of everything you need to do in the 24 hours before you leave for a trip (e.g. have passport ready to go, pack charger for your phone, etc. – even things like making sure that you have any needed prescription medications for the countries you will be visiting and that you have scanned copies of all of your important documents and left them online, as well as writing down the address of your first night’s accommodation on a piece of paper, for example). Go through this checklist for every trip and while checklists are boring and can be forgetful, this one has worked well for me so far. Don’t rely too heavily on the advice of bloggers for long term travel. Talk to many fellow travelers before and during a long term trip. You can learn a lot from their experiences. Three weeks ago on a trip to South America I met a traveler from Australia who had been traveling for about a year and we had a very good conversation about many travel related topics. I would not have had that opportunity if I had only read the top-five-tips articles for long term travel on the internet – written from the comfort of a desk by someone who has never actually done the type of long term travel that the article is recommending.

Closing perspective from years on the road

The patterns described in this article are, most of the time, those that work best for most travelers on most trips. A trip is an object that is too complex to be described fully by a set of rules before it’s gone. Because of this, the traveler has to use the information given by a guide to make a series of conclusions, which will depend on many details that are particular to the trip in question. That being said, given the right mindset, most of the information necessary to make a good trip can be found by the savvy traveler. He or she will read a guide, talk to other travelers, and do the trip. The reading, before the trip, is used to shorten the amount of time that is lost to doing something that doesn’t work before realizing that it doesn’t work. It is the act of doing that teaches the traveler what works.

Sofia Almeida reviewed this article for us. She cross-checked her observations of long-term travel against the itinerary laid out here for trips of a similar length.