Book the ground before the flight
The order most people plan a trip in is backwards, and it costs them the whole first evening.
The instinct is to book the flight first. It is the biggest number on the page, so it feels like the decision everything else hangs off. Then the hotel. Then, somewhere on the way to the airport, the car.
That order is why so many trips begin badly.
A flight is the least flexible thing you will book and the most flexible thing in your day. It moves. It moves for weather, for crew, for a gate. What does not move is the eight-thirty table you booked for the night you land, or the driver who was told nine and has another fare at ten.
Book the ground first and the flight becomes a variable rather than a foundation. Choose the evening you want on arrival — the dinner, the meeting, the hour of nothing — then work backwards to the arrival time that protects it, then to the flight that produces that arrival time. You will often find the flight you would have chosen anyway. Occasionally you find that the obvious flight was quietly going to cost you the whole first night.
The practical version is short. Decide what the first evening is for. Fix the transfer to the hotel, with the driver holding for the actual landing rather than the scheduled one. Then book the flight around it.
Members who do this stop describing arrival days as a write-off. That is the entire return: one day per trip, recovered.