I don't know how much chemistry there needs to be for you two but I would wait closer to the actual trip to start talking to someone new, personally a week is my sweet spot.
When we were first getting started, my wife needed a lot more talking up than she does now. Luckily, she met a couple of older, very experienced bulls, who weren't looking to rush anything and genuinely enjoyed talking to us about what we fantasized about. One guy in particular lived pretty far from us, but it's a city she can easily go through for a connecting flight to the international places she travels for work. He gave her a lot of confidence chatting with her, and she was excited to meet him for literally three months leading up to when it finally happened.
These days, I think she'd agree with you. Now that she's been doing this for real for quite a few years, she doesn't need to be guided through a long build up period to psyche herself up. In fact, it can be hard for a guy to talk about what he wants to do with her in a way that keeps her turned on. Especially if the message arrives when she's busy working, for example. Her attitude is a little more like, "I don't have much time for this. Show me what you look like, tell me a bit about what drew you to us and what you're looking for, demonstrate that you're intelligent, polite, interesting, and respectful of my time, and then let's meet in person before this gets boring, to see if there is chemistry and mutual interest in moving forward. A week or less is fine before trying to schedule a meetup, although it's pretty common for it to take a couple weeks for schedules to line up and get something on the calendar.
As for the last point I think there's a tiny misunderstanding. I don't have any problems talking to the guy at all, in fact there are times where I don't even talk to the chick personally until we meet up.
Oh, no misunderstanding. I didn't mean to imply you weren't willing to talk to/verify with a husband. I just meant there are lots of guys like that, and explaining our own perspective, which is that ALL parties involved should be willing to prove they are what/who they say they are, if they're expecting someone else to set time aside to meet up. Nobody likes to be misled, catfished, ghosted, or otherwise have their time wasted. Efforts to safeguard against that help everyone, and should never be seen as too tall an order.
The only issue is like you mentioned :
"I don't need or ask for a ton of pictures and erotic novel details"
For the guys that do ask for that it's an automatic
"Mind proving you're real?" From me.
I don't blame you. Sometimes I get a dude sending me a barrage of dick pics, sometimes clearly showing the face of some woman sucking it (red flag, especially if he isn't even sharing his own face) and graphic descriptions of how he wants to treat my wife, and it's like, "cool, I guess, but I'm not the one you need to convince. And honestly, if you want to convince her, you might want to tone it down a bit by the time I introduce her. Horny guys aren't a rarity for her. Be (and ACT LIKE) a real person, please."