Put the cities in the shortest order
Optimise route reorders the cities of a trip so you stop crossing your own path. Each stay moves whole, the trip still starts and ends where it does, and any train or flight the new order strands is named, with its price, before it goes.
Trips get built in the order you think of places, not in the order you would travel them. You add Berlin because a friend mentioned it, then Brussels, then Vienna, and the map shows a route that doubles back on itself twice. Optimise route, at the top of the itinerary, puts the cities in the shortest order in one press.
- A city moves as one. Three days in Paris stay three days in Paris, in the order you put them, because a stay is one thing and not three separate days to be scattered through the trip.
- The trip still starts and ends where it does now. That is where the flights are, and a shorter route is not worth moving the day you land or the day you go home.
- Every day is re-dated as it moves, so the trip stays one unbroken run with no gaps and no two days on the same date.
- A day you have not given a city yet stays exactly where it is, since there is nothing to measure it by.
You see what goes before it goes
If you have already booked a train from Paris to Brussels and the reorder puts a different city after Paris, that train is describing a journey your trip no longer makes. Leaving it there means an itinerary that contradicts itself and a budget paying for a train nobody is catching, so it is removed. You see exactly which ones first: the confirmation lists each stranded ride with the two cities it joined and what it cost, and it cannot be undone, so read it before you press.
- Only rides between two cities are ever touched. A walk from your hotel to dinner, a metro across town, a tram to the museum: those have both ends in the same city, and no reordering can make them wrong.
- A ride that still connects its two cities stays exactly as it is. Move Brussels but keep it after Paris and your Paris to Brussels train is untouched.
- The removals happen before anything moves, so if one of them fails the trip is still in the order you know and you can simply press again.
- Optimise is now always in the bar above the map, rather than appearing only after you had moved something by hand. When there is nothing left to improve it is greyed and says why: "The cities are already in their shortest order".
- Open a day and the same button optimises that day instead, the stops within it, the way it always has.
Distances are straight lines between the cities, so treat the result as a sensible starting point rather than a road plan.