Sometimes it feels like deciding where to travel has never been harder than today. With all the social media posts and travel vlogs about amazing destinations, it should technically be easier than ever before, but there just seem to be almost too many choices. Sadly, for most of us, our vacation days and budgets are limited, so it does matter what choices we make with the limited resources that we have.
Everyone has their own way of approaching this topic. We might go to places that our friends said they liked, check what's popular on Instagram, research what cheap flights are available or just try to do a combination of all of these things.
The ideal is to find somewhere that ticks all the boxes, from interests and budget to schedule and the non-negotiables we personally have. This might not sound like an easy feat, but let's go through the process step by step to see how this can be done in the most efficient way.
Step 1: Start with what you want, not where you've heard of
A lot of trip planning starts backwards. We decide on a destination because we've heard good things about it or it's considered to be a must-see travel spot, then we try to make the place work for us. We look for cultural things we might be interested in, the cuisine, the beaches or the shopping options. We also have to see how and if we can make this place work for our budget and if the times of the year we could go coincide with peak season where you have to fork over twice the price for a simple hotel room.
You can easily flip this process by just asking yourself a few important questions before your next trip. What do you want to spend your days doing on your next vacation? Are you interested in surfing, wandering around museums, eating your way through food markets or hiking the mountains? What's your real budget level outside of just flight prices? How much travel time are you willing to tolerate? What are dealbreakers for you, like a place needing to have decent plant-based food or a high level of kid-friendliness?
To make this process easier for you, we've built our Trip Finder with 100 individual filters covering activities, budget level, travel time and practical requirements. You can pick and choose the filters as you please and the system will calculate the best travel destinations for you according to what you've picked, so that you can go and have a closer look at what your options are.
Step 2: Rank your priorities because there's no perfect destination
Even though certain places in the world might have brought you the feeling of "this is perfect" before, in reality there's no perfect destination and whatever you're going for is always a trade-off. The place with world-class diving and stunning marine life might have mediocre food. The hyped up budget destination that everyone calls a "hidden gem" might take three flights to reach and leave you exhausted before you even get there.
The trick is knowing which trade-offs you're willing to make. If you ask yourself what would be the one thing that you'd want guaranteed about your next trip and what other things play a secondary role, you can narrow things down easily. Some aspects that other people place a lot of importance on might not actually matter to you at all. That's exactly why you'll end up happier doing your own research versus following the crowd on travel spots.
This is where a scoring approach beats a simple checklist. The Trip Finder on travelfilters rates each destination on individual scales that you pick (how good it is for hiking, how affordable it is, if you can bring your dog on the trip) and then combines those ratings into a final match score weighted by your preferences. A destination that's a 9/10 for the things you care about might be a 4/10 based on someone else's preferences. The tool gives you a highly personalized output and there's even an advanced mode that allows you to get more detailed and rank the different filters by how important you find them.
A quick word on asking AI where to travel
With the rise of AI, it's getting increasingly popular to just ask a chatbot where to travel according to one's preferences. It can be a good starting point and come up with a few names you hadn't previously considered. But it comes with two limitations worth knowing about.
The first is transparency. An AI hands you a short list of suggestions without showing its work. You don't see the full range of options it considered or why the specific places made the cut. You also have no idea how close the runners-up were. The second is flexibility. If a suggestion isn't quite right, all you can do is rephrase your prompt and hope for a better batch, without ever seeing how a single changed preference might change the whole list of results.
Filtering works differently. When you pick and choose your criteria yourself and watch the full list of destinations re-rank in front of you, you're observing all of your options in one place. You see exactly why each place scores the way it does and you notice destinations you'd never have thought to ask about. You can also activate or deactivate filters as you please, with the results adapting instantly. The result is a decision you understand a lot better and can hopefully have a higher level of trust in.
Step 3: Match the destination to the season, not the other way around
The same destination can be a dream in May and a disappointment in August. Before you fall in love with a place, check whether your dates land in a monsoon season, hurricane season, a stretch of extreme heat or if there might be some local festival that you aren't interested in, but makes hotel prices jump up threefold. In highly popular destinations, it's also worth looking at the crowds. Traveling in the shoulder season might mean thirty to fifty percent lower prices and half the people at every attraction. If you're looking to go to an island in the off-season, it's also worth checking what's actually open when you plan to get there. Some island destinations partially shut down outside the high season, so the dining and tour options might turn out to be slim.
All of our place info pages have best seasons to travel on them as well as detailed climate info, so you can check instantly when the best time to go is.
Step 4: Build a shortlist, not a single pick
Once your filters and priorities are set and you see the list of results, you can have a look at the info pages for the places that the tool came up with. The ones you like, you can save on a list if you have an account [(get one, it's free)] (https://travelfilters.com/en/account) and they'll be conveniently listed there for you to compare. With that shortlist, you can go and check the flight prices and connections from your home airport straight from the place info page, as well as accommodation availability for your dates.
If one place doesn't make the cut this year, we'll keep the selection safe in your profile, so you can have another look further down the line.
Step 5: Think in routes, not just destinations
Oftentimes, the answer to where you should travel isn't a single place, but several. If you have two weeks instead of a long weekend, combining a handful of destinations can be a great idea and not be too stressful. What makes a good route is highly individual as well, but it's generally a good approach to alternate the intensity, following a stop in an intense urban area with a day or two in nature. Sometimes it's also the journey that is the destination and what you see from a train window might be more important to you than taking the most efficient route after all.
Once you've determined where you want to go based on your filter results, travelfilters lets you turn your saved lists into travel routes, so you can string together destinations that individually match your preferences into one coherent trip. We even give you estimated travel times for the drive (and public transport, depending on the country).
Step 6: Do a final feasibility check
Before you book, run your top pick through one last filter. This is the point where you have to take an honest look at whether the trip actually matches your budget, including all the boring costs like transfers, insurance and meals. Ask yourself whether the travel time is actually reasonable for the length of your stay and if your itinerary will allow for enough relaxation or if you might have to scratch a destination or two from your list to achieve that goal.
If it passes, book it. If it doesn't, go back to your shortlist and see if you can find a better fit.
Putting it all together to create the trip that fits you
Choosing where to travel shouldn't just be a random choice between the most popular destinations of the year. When you start choosing your travel spots based on the activities you want to do, your budget, other preferences and dealbreakers, the "where" almost answers itself.
That's the idea behind travelfilters. You can set your preferences across 100 filters and see every destination scored against what matters to you. The winners can then be turned into lists and routes for your next trip.
Your ideal destinations are out there. They're just waiting for you to find them. Try our Trip Finder now to do just that.
