To ask for your feedback on my holiday itinerary for next year?

[ThatCyanSheep]

I'm bored, and fed up of the weather so I've fully planned my holiday next year.

Any opinions of what more I can fit in/what I should take out are welcome!

NICE, France

Hotel: Ibis Budget Californie Lenval

Saturday 29th August

• Fly to Nice - land at 11:30am (ish)
• Tram to Hotel - 20 minutes by bus/9 minutes by tram
• Store bag at hotel/check in (I am an ALL member so I have free early check in) and sort daypack/change to explore
• 12:00 - about 3pm
• Explore Nice old town & get lunch
• 3pm - 5:30pm
• Head back to Promenade des Anglais, get gelato, explore beach, coffee
• 5:30-6:45
• Head back to hotel, shower, freshen up, change
• Dinner - find restaurant along Promenade
• After dinner - sunset stroll then head back to hotel

Sunday 29th August

• Breakfast in Nice
• Nice ➡️ Vilefranche-sur-Mer
• Walk around - visit harbour & town centre
• Coffee & walk
• Villefranche-sur-Mer ➡️ Antibes
• Lunch on train or Antibes
• Explore Antibes
• Picasso Museum
• Visit the port
• Antibes ➡️ Nice
• Relaxed afternoon - read on beach, try to catch some of the F1
• Stroll back to hotel
• Freshen up
• Dinner

Monday 30th August

• Monaco day trip
• Breakfast in Nice
• Nice ➡️ Monaco
• Coffee & explore old town
• Lunch
• Walk the track (or at least some of it)
• Visit the harbour, stroll along and eat
• Monaco ➡️ Nice
• Dinner

Tuesday 1st September

• Beach club day

MILAN, Italy

Hotel: Ibis Milano Centrale

Wednesday 2nd September

• Nice ➡️ Milan (early train, aim to arrive in Milan by midday)
• Head to hotel, store bag and sort daypack
• Explore, head to Duomo for fan event (or wherever the fan event is, it has not been announced yet)
• Find somewhere for dinner
• Back to hotel

Thursday 3rd September

• Breakfast around hotel, explore the area
• Head to Monza for the fan stage and other events
• Back to Milan around midafternoon
• Find lunch and explore
• Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and Brera
• Dinner

Friday 4th September

• Day trip to Lake Como
• Train Milan ➡️ Como Lago
• Breakfast in Como
• Explore, visit the cathedral, funicular ride?
• Como ➡️ Bellagio
• Explore Bellagio
• Bellagio ➡️ Varenna
• Villa Monastero gardens
• Varenna ➡️ Como
• Como Lago ➡️ Milan
• Dinner around the hotel

On Friday, visit grocery store to get water and snacks for the race weekend

Saturday 5th September

QUALI DAY - day in Monza

Dinner near hotel after qualifying

Sunday 6th September

RACE DAY

Dinner near hotel after qualifying
Pack bags
Full body shower to prepare for flight

Monday 7th September

• Breakfast at hotel
• Head to airport at 8am
• Flight home around 11:30

Agreed. Unless you wake up in Bellagio, the idea of getting there, actually seeing some of the town, and then also getting out seems impossible to do anything else in a day.

My recommendation for Bellagio is to arrive one evening have dinner and a stroll, stay over night, explore early the next morning and then get the hell out of there before the ferries start loading the place up!

Agree with pp - there isn’t much point in going abroad and staying in a boring IBIS identical to the same one in every city. At those price points could you find something locally owned that gave you a nice and more authentic experience? Broaden the horizon a bit.

I’m impressed with your level of activity although a realise with F1 to fit in there has to be a level of planning as those timings are set.

My holidays usually look like

flight 6am, leave home 2.30am.

Oh yeah, that’s it except remembering what time I fly home but even then I’m given a pick up time 😂

I think it sounds great, but I don’t think you are allowing yourself enough time with your public transport connections.

But maybe that’s because you are travelling on your own so things are quicker.
Personally, if my flight landed at 11.30, I would be planning to get onto the bus/tram at the airport at 12 at the earliest, not be already checked in to my hotel, and ready to hit the town! I would be thinking “ok, ten minutes to get off the plane and into the airport, 10 minutes to get through passport control, five minutes to find the bus stop and buy my ticket, ten minutes wait for the next bus…

And then the same with all the other trains. Presumably you’ve checked how frequent they are. But I would want to arrive at each station a bit early so that I was sure to find the correct platform etc, which does eat into timings.

Our family have to take physical disability/mobility issues into account, so I do recognise we are much slower than most. But it still blows my mind a bit that you could fit so much in!

Have you booked flights already? The south of France gets stupidly busy in August, so I’d do that bit after the F1.

Well in that case it's almost certainly going to be nonsense as it has no idea about how long people like to spend in certain places or even how they relate to each other in terms of distance.

Someone posted a similar question about it's suggestions for Iceland and a week's holiday included 3 day trips that included 10-12 hours of travelling to visit the far north, east and south of the island.

I tried it for an area of rural Spain that I know well and it suggested using buses and taxis that don't exist to ping pong back and forth across the region to visit village A on day 1, city B on day 2, village C on day 3 that was pretty much walking distance from village A, both of which were about 3 hours travel from city B.

Plus, like others have said, planning in this level of detail a year ahead is rather odd. Yes to planning flights and accommodation if it's available and high demand but otherwise, no need to keep anything other of a running list of things you might like to do while there.

It's the sort of hol I would have planned when I was 26 & new to Europe. I like more countryside & adventure nowadays (30 yrs later). Hope you have a great time.

Yeah this!!

i couldn't imagine being so regimented and rigid. Spontaneity is so much more fun.

No but I have the time off work planned - I need it to be that week because of the bank holiday

I’m travelling hand luggage only so it’ll be straight off the plane, into passport control and then onto the tram which runs frequently and takes 9 mins to get to my hotel on the promenade! I’m quite fast at train stations etc’

I literally won’t be in the hotel besides sleeping and showering though, so I’d rather go cheap on those (and earn points for other trips!) and be out and about than paying a lot for a hotel and feeling like I need to be there because of how much it cost!

Oh wow I can’t get my head around this level of planning for a holiday, but if it makes you happy go for it! Having an itinerary planned out like that would not be a holiday for me!

Why do you need to plan to have a shower? 😳

Full body showering!

If you're hand luggage only, how are you taking razor, your spa like oil, shampoo and body scrub???!!!
This all sounds ridiculous to me.
As if you can get through Nice airport in 10 minutes in the height of holiday season, good luck with that!

I love an Ibis OP, a clean bed, a good shower, & free tea & coffee’s all you need on a trip like that. Don’t let this lot bring you down, they probably never leave the hotel as they do AI where they only move from sunbed to buffet x3 daily. Enjoy!

We've just come back from northern Spain, where we had a couple of days of total downpours. Could you accommodate that in your plans?

Add in travel and transfer times otherwise it's impossible to know if it's a good plan!

I'll just take a light packable rain jacket, it rained in Rome when I was there and I just wore shorts and a rain jacket and got on with it! The only thing the rain would really impact would be the beach day, which I'm happy to sack off if needs must!

The airport I am flying out of doesn't have the 10ml rule anymore and you can carry razors (just not the kind with loose blades), in your hand luggage - decant into smaller bottles and it all fits!

Haha, I do think for some trips having a nice hotel is lovely, and I've done plenty of AI holidays. But for something like this all I want is a bed that'll be made each day and somewhere to shower! Hotels in Milan are extortionate at that time of year because of the F1, for anything above the IBIS you're genuinely looking at £4000+ which is just insanity

Whoa. You are mad. Who plans their holidays like that? I guess you do. Mine is more like:
fly to Spain get hire car drive to villa, collecting some food along the way.
Chill out with the only decision for the next ten days, deciding the morning of or possibly the night before: what restaurant should we go to and is it a beach day or stay at home pool day and do we need to buy more food? Though on Fridays it’s always market day and nothing will stop us from buying some churros!
Fly back to UK.

This is obviously not that type of holiday? I don’t want to spend ten days by the pool because I want to explore?

I enjoy making a proper holiday plan too and there's absolutely nothing wrong with a reliable convenient cheap hotel.

I still think it will take you more than 30 mins from the plane landing to having dropped your stuff at the hotel (I flew back into Stansted the other day and it took me 20 mins from the plane getting to the stand to the train station, and I'm very fast) but hey. As others have said, the Sun 29 and Fri 4 itineraries are ridiculous and don't sound remotely enjoyable, but you can easily rework them when you're there.

But exploring doesn't mean you have to take it to the extreme and allocate your slot for a shower. Sounds exhausting!