By Global Social Season editors · 6 September 2026 · updated 10 September 2026
Every event page carries a recommended arrival and departure day, and the reasoning is the same across the calendar. Multi-day events build: the first day is quiet, the middle is full, the last is the one everybody attends and then leaves together. Arriving the evening before the first day means the city at its most relaxed; leaving the morning after the last means paying for the night the hotels charge most for and sharing the airport with everyone. For a four-day Grand Prix, Wednesday to Monday is the full week; Thursday to Sunday night is the common compromise. For a fair, the preview days are the ones to be there for if you are invited and the public Saturday is the one to avoid if you are not. For a fortnight like Wimbledon or a Slam, the second week is the social one.
The trip planner turns your own dates into the events you will overlap with and rates the hotel pressure you can expect. The destination pages say when each place fills and empties across the year.
The recommendation on each page is a default, not a rule, and the reasoning behind it is set out in The week around it, which lists what else is happening in the same city in the seven days on either side. Sometimes the right answer is to break the pattern: to arrive early for a city that empties the morning after a final, or to stay on when a second event follows in the same place, which is what the Circuit continues line at the foot of the page is for. The trip planner's hotel-pressure rating is built from the scores of every event overlapping your dates within the destination and its surroundings, so that a quiet week in one town can still read as heavy when the neighbouring one is full. The weekend index does the same for the whole calendar, weekend by weekend, and is the quickest way to see which Saturdays of the year to plan around and which to avoid.
