When it comes time to pick your next (or first!) destination, a lot of people go about it a kind of backwards way: a logistics-first approach that focuses on facts and features.
At the risk of offending everybody who has ever posted a “where should I go next” question on a travel forum or Facebook group, I present a different way of looking at this process, that I have found not only adds significant depth, meaning, & enjoyment to my travels, it is now and has been for a long time, the process that primarily informs my decisions in picking my next location – or as you’ll see, sometimes staying in the same place for longer.
Travel is a process of exploration – both the world, and yourself
Ultimately, the answer to the question of what criteria to use to evaluate a place is going to be up to you, and what you prioritize.
And, most likely – or at least I would hope – that will change over time as you discover more about what you want, what you like, and what you need.
So that is the first point in this: be prepared to explore, because that’s how you find out what suits you and what’s important to you.
De-emphasizing the importance of deciding based on facts
More to the immediacy of actually having to pick a place, and how to go about that in a way that is more likely to lead you to enjoy & benefit more from it, more often, there are potentially a huge amount of factors to consider, and you can use a site like NomadList or Numbeo to evaluate many of them.
Once caveat I would make about any aggregate and especially crowdsourced site like this, is to just consider it “relative” data and not absolute, since much of it is user-submitted (which is prone to being gamed, manipulated, and straight out mislead), it’s not necessarily accurate objectively besides things that come from reputable APIs like weather, but subjectively – that is, it can give you a decent idea of what to expect in terms of logistics, mostly compared to other data on the site. And I make that caveat without assigning blame or fault – simply there are too many personal factors at play.
Introducing: The Passion-First Approach
What I’d like to do for you, is give you the process that I use nearly a decade into my travels to pick every place I spend a significant amount of time (at least 1-2 months), and that is to not do the logistics-first approach way of searching for a place, but, and excuse the common self-help-hype jargon here, but the Passion-First Approach.
In a nutshell, it works like this:
Like What You See?
1. Logistical Necessities:
Since I just disclaimed away logistics (seemingly), I want to address that I’m not saying ignore logistics, but rather, ignore most of them, at least at first – especially in the light of exploring.
Rather – and this is something you have to spend time thinking about what are the absolute most important ones for you – make the distinctions of “must have” and “would like” or “want to”, and make only the “must-haves” into your lowest common denominator, that you then apply at the end of the process (I’ll reference back to this then).
This isn’t to say you’ll only ever have the bare minimum in this approach – that is a problem with using the word “necessities” here – but rather that you define what is actually key for you, really the things you can’t live without, then since you have that clarity, build the rest of what you want on top of it, in order of priority (which you define yourself, starting with your best guess from your past and present priorities to start, then refining over time as you get more used to the realities of travel).
Some Examples
So as an example of a potential logistical necessity, is one that can be externally forced upon you by the requirements of “remote work”.
Most people who say “remote work” mean actually “remote job” rather than for example “freelancing remotely” or “running your business remotely” or “trading remotely”, to name just a few.
If that’s the case, you may have a very real logistical necessity of timezone, one from which if you stray too far, will have you living odd hours, that you may end up liking (explore..) or hating.
Another example is the internet you may need to, for example, upload media, or have video calls, etc.
This is a bit trickier to evaluate because it really depends on the individual locations in your life rather than the country on average, for the most part.
You may have a country that on average has really good connectivity, but your airbnb gives you a crummy data stick with 10GB quota and .. let’s not even talk about the speeds.
Or on the other hand, the country may be really lacking but you find a good cafe or (more likely) coworking space with fiber and boom, no internet problems in a country that otherwise everybody complains about.
As you can see these are just two. There are plenty more, and you have to figure out, within the various types of logistical considerations, what you prefer for yourself.
Another example, safety.
How safe? What is safe, actually?
Even within the same city there can be very safe and very dangerous areas. Gender can affect this. Then you can do a lot for your personal safety in your habits and possessions.
The other side of logistical necessities is also what you refuse to accept.
I don’t have many of these myself, a big one is that I don’t go to or near active war zones (and for my purposes that takes care of “safety” for me sufficiently in addition to how I conduct myself and some preventative measures).
Where to Find More, and More Detail
The full list of the most important factors to consider as potential logistical necessities, if you’re interested in having them laid out in detail, and in the context of long-term travel, are codified within the “Picking Your Perfect Place, Again and Again” module in our Transition to Travel course – which, in addition to picking where to go, covers the entirety of the transition from settled to nomadic, from the necessities you’ll need to the optimizations you’ll want to have, and guides you through that entire logistical process of achieving your locational freedom, step-by-step.
2. Follow Your Heart
Locational freedom is just that: the freedom to be where you want to be.
I suggest, in short, the place to pick, is the place that calls out to you most.
How little I am writing about this, compared to the rest, I hope will emphasize the importance of the point: go where you want to go.
3. Get Recommendations
The problem with asking people online, is that even if you tell them some things about you and what you want, they just don’t know enough about you, enough about what you want and like, etc., to be able to give you really great recommendations. It could happen, but anyone you ask, for example on a forum or a facebook group, would be operating on a very limited data set.
On top of that, the question is usually either based in logistics (e.g. where are good beaches), and even those responding are usually doing so based on very limited data sets of their own experience, mostly comprising of the same nomad congregations and other popular destinations, so you see the same 5-10 places pop up every single time, with slight variance depending on where you ask the question.
There is very much a place for online recommendations, and that’s in getting specific details about logistics once you’ve found what’s important and narrowed down the actual place by other criteria, to see if they fit your logistical necessities.
You can go to location-specific forums (I find expat ones are usually “better” because the people there have a deeper, wider, and more specialized knowledge of the place as a matter of course, but in lieu of those for your place, more traveler ones or nomad ones often will do) to get that kind of information.
Instead, try finding recommendations from those who have more in common with you at a level that is more important to you: friends, who know you best and have travelled, then later on, people you meet while traveling (as they also know you in person, albeit not as closely, and you may have things in common by virtue of how and where you’ve met that could translate to recommendations), or even going based on hobby or interest for example, and finding where the best places would be to do what you want to do (which is another good use of online communities, that surround the hobby/interest).
4. Do a “Soft Landing”
A kind of subset of #3, you can try a nomad hub as one of your first places to ease into the lifestyle, around a network of other people in similar life circumstances (at least in the “ongoing travel” part) who can support you.
Nomad hubs generally have a base level of logistics taken care of (you can consider them “pre-vetted” for at least the lowest common denominators of this lifestyle), and are generally interesting places that often also cater to tourists (and then the trailblazing nomads of yore figured out how to plug into that infrastructure and make it a bit more suited to our needs).
5. Be Your Own Guide
If nothing really calls out to you, your hobbies don’t necessarily take you places, your friends don’t know/haven’t traveled much, and the nomad hubs seem uninteresting to you, the first next places to think of are the ones that you have either been to before and enjoyed (believe it or not, it’s okay to go back somewhere you’re been! there’s a weird stigma around this for some reason), or, find somewhere mostly similar and just pick it.
Likes Japan? Try South Korea. Peru was great? Try Chile. Big fan of France? Try Italy. And so forth.
Then, you can get to work on the logistics
Hopefully, even just these things (even just #2) will yield a large list to choose from.
It’s at that point you start applying your logistical necessities to your top priorities (also note, the above list is in what I’d consider priority order, except 4 and 5 which are interchangeable).
If you’ve got a lot of options that all fit an equal priority of criteria and meet logistical necessities, you may start applying logistical filters at more of the “want” or “like” levels, but I caution you in this approach, in making it an endless game of “I must pick the perfect place and it must be the perfect, perfect place, the first time” – one that just delays your move abroad.
But don’t let them consume you
Location freedom, as the name implies, is the ability to go anywhere you want, and so if you make a mistake, you will learn more about what you like, then adapt from there. On top of that, exploration guarantees you mistakes, it’s how you learn. You can’t avoid them, and you just suffer more (and/or stunt yourself) if you try.
Just make the best fast first decision you can, and go from there.
If you follow the slow/deep travel style, and you put a minimum of 1 month in a place, that’s the time investment you have to “lose” in one place – but even then, most places you’d realistically consider with this approach I’ve outlined, even if they turn out “terrible” in terms of your preferences (which again actually would be a good thing because you would be fleshing out your misconceptions and making your travels more suited to yourself in the future), there will still be a way for you to make the most out of it and make it “workable”, if not actually enjoyable, for that amount of time.
On the other hand, it could turn out great, and you could decide to extend your time there, perhaps significantly.
In either case, that experience of discovery through exploration will inform how you make the decision for each next place you go, as you find things you didn’t expect, confirm things you did, and clarify where you missed the mark.
And all of those things will happen.
The place for logistics-first, is last, if ever
If after all this you are still barren for options – well first of all I would consider if maybe the right course of action is just to stay where you are for a while (this also applies to people who are using this process to pick their next place while traveling: you don’t always have to keep moving, sometimes staying longer in a place is not only fine, it’s just what the doctor ordered) – but I would say if ever, that would be the time to do logistics-first approach, still with the mindset of exploring, so that hopefully, you can find places (through the “types” of things you like in this case) that speak to and affect you at a deeper level.
I always find those places that call out to me are the ones I have the best experiences in, by an order of magnitude.