The night after is the one people get wrong

Planning a trip to an event runs forwards: flights, nights before, tickets. The exit gets whatever is left over, usually a morning flight that looked cheap in February. It is the single most common way a good weekend ends badly.

The reason is simple arithmetic. Everyone arrives across three or four days and leaves inside about four hours.

Book the last night

On almost every event page here, the last row of the days table says some version of the same thing: stay the night the event ends.

• Le Mans: the race finishes mid-afternoon on Sunday and the roads out of a city of 140,000 do not clear for hours.
• Ryder Cup: nobody is driving to Dublin after the closing ceremony, and the N21 out of Adare is one lane each way.
• Boston: a point-to-point marathon that finishes in the afternoon, and an evening flight you will not enjoy.
• Berlin: nobody wants an airport four hours after 42 kilometres.
• Edinburgh’s Hogmanay: nothing leaves the city easily on the morning of 1 January.

One extra night is the cheapest insurance in travel. It is almost always less than the change fee on the flight you will otherwise want to move.

What each kind of exit actually looks like

An island or a boat. The Isle of Man TT is the extreme case: every sailing off the island on the final Saturday is full, and the answer is to leave on the Sunday instead. Any event reached by ferry has this shape — the bottleneck is the vehicle deck, not the road.

A circuit in a valley. At Mugello the roads are two lanes and the choice is to leave before the podium or spend two hours stationary. The same is true of most rural circuits: Goodwood has the best thirty minutes of the weekend and the worst car park queue, in that order.

A small town on a railway. At the Dutch TT the trains back to Groningen fill instantly; walking to the station early beats queueing for an hour. Trains run reinforced but not infinitely.

A city that closes its centre. After Mardi Gras nothing moves out of New Orleans on the Tuesday evening. After the Tour de France Grand Départ the centre of Edinburgh is shut to cars from early morning — the way out is on foot or not at all.

A festival field. Glastonbury on a Monday morning is six hours of traffic; the quiet exit is Sunday night, before the headliner ends, which is a genuine trade and worth making knowingly.

Four rules that cover the rest

1. Never book a flight before noon on the day after. If the event finishes late, make it the day after that.
2. Check the last train, not the timetable. A 30-minute commute with a 22:40 last train is not a 30-minute commute.
3. Know which side of the closure you sleep on. Parade routes, road closures and bridges decide whether your hotel is 10 minutes or 90.
4. Leave before the end, or long after it. The worst possible time to move is the fifteen minutes after the final whistle, the chequered flag or the last song.

When leaving early is right

Sometimes it is. If you have seen the thing you came for, the ninety minutes you save by walking out before the podium are real, and no one will remember that you missed the trophy presentation.

The mistake is doing it by accident — discovering at 17:30 that the only train is at 17:34. Every event page here says what the last hour looks like, and it is worth reading before you book anything.