Why it matters

This is the question that actually determines what the trip feels like day to day — more than which countries, more than which cities. It is also the one where people most reliably overestimate what fourteen days holds.

The hidden cost is that a travel day is not half a day. It is checkout by 11, bags stored or dragged, transit to the station or airport, the journey, transit to the new place, check-in from 3, and then unpacking. Even a two-hour train consumes most of the useful hours of a day. Six stops means five of those.

The options

1. Three bases, four to five nights each

Unpack three times. Each city gets enough days that you can see the headline sights and have a day with nothing scheduled — which is the day that people actually remember afterwards.

Day trips do the work of extra stops without the cost: Pompeii from Naples, Florence from Rome (about 1h30 each way by high-speed rail), Granada and Seville from each other. You get the additional places without the additional unpacking.

The cost is breadth. Three bases is three cities plus whatever the day trips add.

2. Five or six stops, two to three nights each

You see more places. On a trip this far from home that has real pull, especially if the family’s instinct is that they may not come back.

The cost is that roughly a third of the trip is spent in transit or in hotel lobbies waiting for a room. Two nights in a city is one full day; you see the top two sights and leave. By the second week, the packing becomes genuinely wearing, and it is usually the teenagers who tire of it first.

My recommendation

Three bases, four nights minimum each, with day trips carrying the extra places — this is the guideline for a trip that stays inside one arc.

Fourteen days minus two flying days is twelve. Three bases uses two of those on moves, leaving ten real days across three cities — enough for each city to have a proper unstructured day. Six stops would use five days on moves, leaving seven real days across six cities, and none of them unstructured.

The split arc is the one deliberate exception. It spends a fourth base to cover both the Mediterranean and the northern cities, which means nights per stop drop to three or four rather than four-plus. That is a real trade against this page’s default, made on purpose for what the extra base buys — not a case of the site disagreeing with itself. Five or more bases is still where I would push back regardless of arc.

What would change my mind

• The honest test: in five years, would the family rather have seen more places, or enjoyed them more? Different families answer this differently and both answers are right.
• If everyone genuinely likes moving. Some people find the travel days themselves fun. If that is this family, the calculus changes.
• What Bubu and Gaby say. At 17 and 15 they will feel the packing fatigue most sharply — see What do the kids want?.