"How many days should I spend in Paris?" is one of those questions everyone asks and nobody answers with real data, just vibes. So we pulled trip length from real trips planned in Routely across nine cities and looked at what people actually book.
One honest caveat before the numbers: this is average length of the whole trip that includes each city, not necessarily days spent only in that city. That matters most for Japan, where Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka often show up together in one longer itinerary rather than three separate trips. We called that out below where it applies.
The quick city breaks: 5-6 days
Paris: 5.0 days. The shortest average of any city in the data, and it tracks. Paris rewards a tight, walkable trip more than a sprawling one. Four or five days gets you the Louvre, Montmartre, and a proper lunch without feeling rushed.
London: 5.4 days. Almost identical to Paris. Big city, dense sightseeing, most people treat it as a long weekend-plus rather than a full week.
Barcelona: 5.8 days. Slightly longer than London, probably because a beach day tends to get added to the itinerary alongside Gaudi and the old town.
The week-ish trips: 6-7 days
New York: 6.3 days. A full week minus a day. Enough time for the museums, a Broadway show, and a day trip out of the city without it feeling optional.
Rome: 7.3 days. The first city where the average clears a full week. Rome trips in our data tend to extend into the rest of Italy, Florence and Venice show up often as add-ons, which pulls the number up.
The marathon trips: 9+ days
Tokyo: 9.8 days. Almost double London's average. Japan is far and expensive to get to for most of our users, so once someone commits to the flight, they commit to the trip.
Bali: 10.8 days. Same logic as Tokyo: long-haul flight, so the trip stretches to justify it. Bali also isn't one city, so those days get spread across Ubud, Canggu, and Uluwatu rather than one home base.
Kyoto: 11.7 days and Osaka: 12.7 days, the two highest averages in the data, and this is the caveat from the intro in action: these numbers are almost certainly inflated by multi-city Japan itineraries. A trip that includes Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka gets counted once for each city, at the full trip length. Read these two less as "spend 12 days in Osaka" and more as "Japan trips as a whole tend to run long."
What this actually means for planning
If you're building a Japan trip, budget more time than you think, the data backs up what every Japan-return traveler already tells you. If you're doing a European city, five to seven days is the real-world norm, not the two-week fantasy Pinterest sells you. And if you're stacking a beach add-on, expect it to add a day, not a week.
Want to see exactly how those days actually break down, spot by spot? That's what the Routely Presents city guides are for.
