A number out of 100 is a strange thing to attach to a holiday. It suggests the trip can be graded, and that a higher grade is a better time away. Neither is quite true. The score on a plan health check is useful for one specific job: telling you whether anything in the plan will fail on contact with the actual day.
It helps to know how the number behaves, because it does not behave like an average.
The score is capped, not averaged
Four dimensions feed the overall score. Feasibility covers whether the schedule and the routing can physically happen. Intent fidelity covers whether the plan is the trip you asked for. Experience covers pacing and meals and whether the days are worth having. Completeness covers what is missing, mostly lodging.
Feasibility carries the most weight, which is the right priority: a beautifully intentioned day that cannot be walked is not a day.
But the weighting is not what surprises people. Two caps sit on top of it. A single critical feasibility problem holds the overall score below 50 regardless of everything else. And the weakest dimension caps the total, so if one dimension is sitting in the sixties, the overall cannot climb into the eighties.
This is why fixing things does not move the number
The most common reaction to a plan health check is to work through the findings list, clear three or four of them, run the review again, and find the score has moved by two points.
Nothing is broken. A cap is holding it. The findings you cleared were real, but they were not the ones setting the ceiling.
The fix is to stop reading the overall score as your progress bar and read the dimension scores instead. They tell you which part of the trip is weakest, and the weakest part is the only one that can lift the total. Clearing five experience findings while feasibility sits at 58 changes almost nothing.
Bands describe, they do not instruct
Above 90 is excellent. Eighty to 89 is strong. Sixty-five to 79 is workable. Below that, the plan needs revision before it can be trusted.
Workable deserves defending. A trip with open afternoons, unbooked dinners, and one long travel day that you have accepted will land in the workable band and stay there. That is not an incomplete trip. It is a trip with room in it, and room is often the point.
Chasing a number into the nineties usually means removing exactly the slack that makes a holiday feel like one. Densely scheduled trips score well on completeness and badly on the actual afternoon.
What the score cannot tell you
A clean score means the plan is internally consistent: the days fit, the routes connect, the nights are accounted for. It says nothing about whether the restaurant is any good, whether the museum is worth two hours, or whether the town is charming in November.
It also says nothing about the world outside the plan. Opening hours change, trains get cancelled, a festival closes a street. A 94 is not a promise, and a 71 is not a warning about your taste.
Use the number to find the things that will break. Use your own judgment for everything that makes the trip worth taking.
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