Tips for picking your next country

Once you're traveling picking and planning the next country to visit is sometimes trivially easy (when you're right next to a country on your bucketlist), but sometimes it ends up being a decently involved process.

Step 1: Determine viable countries

Begin by excluding nearby countries that are inaccessible due to visa requirements, timezone issues, internet quality issues or safety concerns. This article details useful resources that can help with figuring this out.

For each remaining country, check travel connections on Rome2Rio. In general if Rome2Rio claims a connection exists it will be accurate, but be cautious about relying on prices and timetables from Rome2Rio and instead verify them directly at the source. If you plan to fly to another country, check prices on Google Flights for Asia and the Americas, or both Google Flights and Kiwi for Europe and Central Asia.

Pick a specific country at this point, or create a shortlist and go through the following steps for each country on the shortlist.

Step 2: Choose between traveling around or basing yourself in a major city

Typically, longer (4+ weeks) stays in a single apartment offer cost savings and a more relaxing experience compared to constantly changing hotels (we think 6 weeks is the ideal number of weeks, for more information, refer to this article). Major cities often provide more options for such AirBnBs and are more likely to have a stable internet connection. However, sometimes traveling around is necessary to see and experience everything a country has to offer.

Research online sample itineraries for one or two weeks in the chosen country. Mark all the places of interest on a map, using mapping applications that allow saving (and sometimes sharing) these locations with travel partners. Check travel times on Rome2Rio between major cities and the sights you wish to visit, and determine whether it's viable to visit the sights through weekend trips or not.

If you decide to stay in a major city, proceed to step 3. If you decide to travel around, proceed to step 5.

Step 3: Determine where to stay in a city

Once again we tend to research all the things we would like to see in a city. We typically use the 'Things to do' feature of Google Travel for this. The great thing about this tool is that it allows you to click the little 'bookmark' icon, that will directly save the item to your map (it will show up as a special icon in your Google Maps app). This will be useful later (it sucks when you realize that you walked right by something cool, but you just didn't realize it was right next door), but right now it allows you to determine which parts of the city are interesting.

Separately we tend to check Hoodmaps which is a somewhat overwhelming site allowing people to describe the different neighborhoods in a city. It's far from perfect, but it's a great tool to get a quick feeling for which neighborhoods you might want to avoid.

Step 4: Book an AirBnB

In the realm of short-term rentals, AirBnB overwhelmingly dominates the market. While exploring other rental sites is worthwhile, in practice, we have always booked through AirBnB. It's important to note that "monthly discounts" apply for stays of 28 nights or more, so it's virtually always worth booking for 28 nights (it's not uncommon for 4 weeks to be cheaper than 3 weeks for many apartments).

Step 5: Book your hotels

This step follows the traditional approach to vacation planning, so there is not much to elaborate on. Our strategy is typically to go for one of the cheaper hotels with a double bed and a 8+ on booking.com. If it's really cheap we will either get a triple room or a 9+ hotel.