When you build a trip in Routely, you pick a pacing: chill, normal, busy, or ludicrous. Yes, ludicrous is a real option. We built it as a joke for the people who want to see eleven things before lunch, and then we checked the data to see if anyone actually picks it.
What people actually chose, out of every trip with a pacing set
The part that surprised us
Normal wins by a landslide, which is exactly what you'd expect from a default option. But look at the bottom two. Ludicrous edges out chill. Not by much, eighteen trips versus twenty, close enough to call it a tie, but we expected chill to win that matchup comfortably. It didn't. There are, right now, eighteen real trips somewhere in the world booked at maximum intensity, on purpose, by people who saw the word "ludicrous" next to a pacing option and thought: yes, correct, that's me.
Why "busy" is the real story here
Busy sits at 15%, a real, sizable minority who looked at "normal" and decided it wasn't enough. That tracks with something we hear a lot: people don't actually want a relaxing vacation as much as they think they do. They want to see everything, sleep four hours a night, and call it a vacation anyway. Busy is the pacing for people who are honest about that with themselves. Ludicrous is the pacing for people who are honest about it and also a little unhinged.
So which one should you pick
Normal, unless you have a specific reason not to. It's the default because it works for most trips: enough time at each stop to actually enjoy it, without so much dead time that you're padding the itinerary with things you don't care about. Save busy for short trips where you're optimizing for maximum sightseeing per day. And save ludicrous for the trip where you already know you're not going to sleep much anyway, so you might as well plan around it instead of against it.
Building a trip? Pick your pacing and see the difference for yourself.
