Sortie vs Visit A City: Which Trip Planner Gives You More Freedom?

Choose Visit A City if you want to start with a ready-made city sightseeing itinerary and customise it. Choose Sortie if you want to build the trip around your own places, several destinations, hotel changes and a day-by-day structure you control from the beginning.

Visit A City is built around a simple and useful idea: most first-time visitors to a city do not want to start from an empty screen. Its public destination pages provide suggested itineraries of different lengths, attraction information, maps and routes. Existing itineraries can be adjusted, and its planning surfaces let travellers add attractions and their own places.

The current mobile app also emphasises customised itineraries, destination guides and bookable tours and activities. On the web, Visit A City explicitly encourages travellers to start from an adjustable guide, change duration, add attractions, change transportation settings, download or print the plan and use the app offline.

That is an efficient workflow for a classic city break. If you land in Vienna, Rome or Seville with no list of your own, a sensible prebuilt route removes a lot of blank-page work.

• Large catalogue of city sightseeing content
• Suggested itineraries by trip length
• Optimised daily routes
• Attraction information inside the planning flow
• Ability to add your own places
• Tours and activities integrated into the product
• Offline and printable itinerary options

Sortie starts from the opposite direction. It assumes you may already have restaurants saved in Google Maps, a museum from a magazine article, an Atlas Obscura oddity, a hotel you are considering, a train between two cities and ten browser tabs that do not belong to anybody else's prebuilt guide.

Collections let those ideas exist before you assign them to a day. The itinerary then gives the trip explicit structure: destinations, segments, hotel context, travel handoffs and daily plans. You can keep moving things around without having to rebuild the trip from scratch.

That is particularly important on longer and multi-city trips. A three-night city break can live comfortably inside a prebuilt city guide. A three-week route through six cities becomes a different planning problem because the cities affect one another.

Visit A City's strongest idea is curation. It reduces uncertainty by giving you a route that already exists and then letting you customise it. Sortie's strongest idea is ownership. It gives you a structure for whatever trip you want to build, whether or not the places were already in Sortie's destination content.

Neither approach is inherently better. A traveller who wants to see the major sights in Florence over two days may prefer to begin with a proven sightseeing plan. A traveller planning Madrid, Seville, Cádiz and Lisbon around very specific food, photography and architecture interests may resent any planner that assumes the trip should start from its own list.

This is also why Sortie is not positioned as an AI itinerary generator. Assistance can help, but the traveller keeps control over what belongs in the trip and how it is arranged.

Visit A City has the easier starting point for a first-time visitor who has done little research. Pick a city, choose an itinerary, adjust the pace and attractions, and you have a practical sightseeing spine quickly.

Sortie makes more sense if you already have a strong personal list or if the city break is part of a bigger route. In that case, being able to save ideas separately, organise them into days and keep the surrounding trip context visible is more useful than starting from a generic itinerary.

Sortie. Multi-city and multi-segment planning is a core Pro capability, and the product keeps hotel changes and travel handoffs inside the itinerary structure. Visit A City does publish multi-destination itineraries, and its guides can be adjusted, but its strongest public experience remains destination and sightseeing-led.

If your trip is fundamentally a route across several bases rather than one city with a list of attractions, Sortie's architecture is the closer fit.

Both products allow custom places, which is important. The difference is how central that freedom is to the workflow. Visit A City encourages travellers to add their own place when something is missing from its attraction list. Sortie is designed around the assumption that your own saved places may be the trip.

That makes Sortie a stronger match for independent planners who build trips from many sources rather than primarily from a destination guide.

Visit A City remains an excellent product for one of travel planning's most common jobs: ‘I am going to this city for two or three days. Give me a sensible route and let me change it.’ Its curated itineraries, attraction catalogue, route optimisation and tours make that job fast.

Sortie is the better fit when your question is messier: ‘I have my own places, several cities, hotel changes and a trip that keeps evolving. Help me keep it coherent while I decide.’

If you want a prebuilt city plan, choose Visit A City. If you want a planning workspace that bends around your trip rather than asking your trip to begin with its guide, choose Sortie.