We picked his top 6 schools and mapped out a plan of visiting (our school district only allows 3 missed days per year for college visits so it took a lot of planning - plus he worked at a camp 5 hours away all summer). We spread the visits out over Jr. and Sr. year. Two were within driving distance and we did those together one on a Friday and one on a Saturday so took a 4 day weekend. The other 4 we flew to. One of those we made into a family vacation.
This was not totally ideal. He wasn’t interested in the first few we went on. Just not ready to think about college yet. This was kid specific. He had a bad Junior year (not with grades just everything else). Those we did at the end of the summer before his Senior year and at the very beginning were much better.
For him the visits were very important. Most of his schools were safeties so figuring out which one he really fit into was of the most importance to us once we had our list narrowed (plus who gave him the best deal!) We were able to learn things on our first visit that made it possible to get some excellent program acceptances.