My son also limited his official visits to 3. This forced him to say “no” to a school that had offered an official visit a little earlier than he might have, but I think that worked out to be a good thing. We live in the North East, and all three schools were drives, subways, or trains, so no flights. In addition to keeping the schedule reasonable, it was good to have 2 official visits in the pocket–just in case.
It worked out that his three visits all coincided with invitational (not championship) meets. These were two weeks apart, with the final one somewhere around the 10th of October. We figured this would more or less give a week for a decision after seeing all the schools, and two weeks to write an application (and possibly give 2 coaches chances to make other offers).
My son just skipped the first invitational (team was very strong, so coach would regularly give runners a meet off anyway), and left for the visits after the 2nd and 3rd meets. There is a definite need to be strategic about the visits. I think my son was pretty tired on the third visit, which might have affected his opinion of the school.
Since the visits coincided with race weekends, just going on runs with the college teams was fine.
Some tactical things: 1) assume that visits will be public knowledge. We tried to keep things quiet, but the first visit–including the school name–wound up being reported on mile split. We were very glad that son had been honest with the coaches ahead of time. 2) try to talk to athletes one on one during the visit. You hope it is not the case, but if there are problems you are more likely to hear about them away from the rest of the team. 3) know the official visits is a 2 way interview all week long. A sarcastic joke that lands awkwardly can cost an offer. 4) be up front with the coaches on timeline. We made our son promise to not commit without talking with us first, and he also let the coaches know that he wanted to take all his visits before making a decision. If pressed, we told our son to blame us for that. Coaches were fine with this. The coach of the first visit said he would let son know if the spot was in danger of being timed out, the coach of the third visit said he would try to arrange a last minute trip if son was being pressed for time by another team. Neither happened, but it was good to hear. 5) more than half of the coaches that recruited my son were gone before my son graduated from college. The advice we got was pick for school, program, coach—in that order.
Ultimately, I think my son wound up in the right place for him. He liked meeting the coaches and teams and seeing the schools. Telling people no was hard for my son, but a good growth experience. Coaches were all classy after the nos. As a parent, I would have been fine trusting any of the coaches with my son’s college experience. There can be more than one right decision, too.