How we plan your days
Every Go Places itinerary is built the same way: we turn a city into a graph of places, then run an optimization that finds the best path through it for your trip.
A city, as a graph
For each city we build a graph. The nodes are the places: sights, activities, restaurants, and hotels. Every node carries the facts an optimizer needs: tags describing what it is (landmark, market, hiking, fine dining), an editorial must-see weight, a price tier, the best time of day to visit, its neighborhood, and its coordinates.
The edges connect them: “pairs well with” links between places that belong together on the same day, and the walking routes between each day's stops. Nothing on the site is a free-floating recommendation; everything lives somewhere in the graph.
Scored for you, not for everyone
A graph alone is just a map of what exists. Your preferences decide what matters. Your travel style (first-timer, outdoorsy, foodie, romantic, family), budget, and pace re-weight every node before any planning starts:
- Style values the tags you care about: foodies score markets and long dinners higher, outdoorsy travelers score trails and open water.
- Budget penalizes anything over your tier, and splurgers lean upmarket.
- Pace sets how many stops a day holds: relaxed, balanced, or packed.
Global icons like the Colosseum or the Eiffel Tower carry extra editorial weight, so the landmarks rarely drop out no matter your style.
The optimization
With every place scored, the planner builds your days. Each day is anchored in one neighborhood and filled with the highest-value stops, with a bonus when paired places share a day and a penalty for zigzagging across town. Days are dealt out to neighborhoods by value, with a nudge to cover new ground instead of repeating yesterday.
Then each day is sequenced into a walkable order:
- Stops are ordered by time of day: mornings first, evenings last, with lunch splitting the day.
- Lunch and dinner are chosen to minimize the detour off your path. Foodies get more slack: the optimizer will cross town for the right meal.
- Your hotel sits near the day's center of gravity, and we switch bases only when it saves real walking time.
Same inputs, same plan
The planner is deterministic code, not vibes. The server and your browser run the exact same optimization, so what you see is what you get, and changing a preference re-optimizes the whole trip instantly.
Where people come in
The algorithm never invents places; it only finds the best route through real ones. The graph itself is researched by our team: every place is sourced, geocoded, tagged, and given its editorial weight in a human-reviewed research pass before the optimizer ever sees it.