After some research, I ended up with a huge lists of great places (destinations) around the world. Now the thing is: 1. they’re too many to choose from, and 2. some of these great places aren’t so great in present days.
Destinations Filtering (aka. Itinerary Design)
I’ve chosen a few criteria to further research these destinations:
- visa requirements: I have to be able to get there;
- affordability: I should afford to fly and live there;
- safety: I don’t wanna die there;
- weather: I want an endless summer!;
- appeal: I have to like it (beaches, islands, mountains).
Visa Requirements
For Romanian citizens, here’s a list with the visa requirements for (almost) all countries: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1Spew9GOmzCOHBUYnN1aGd3NkU/view?usp=sharing
For other citizenship, you can use this site to check visa requirements: https://www.visahq.com/citizens/
Affordability
Until I find a balance between work and travel, I will try to be more economic, so for now I’m gonna focus on accommodation prices between 200 – 400 USD (600 USD at most). There’s plenty of options.
As for transportation, I’m flying with low-cost airlines as AirAsia, Aeroflot, VietJet, Wizzair, and others. I’m trying to tackle this aspect by developing a cheap flight itinerary finder — a tool named Flight.Cat. For now is more of a prototype, working with only one low-cost airline, Wizzair, which only flies in Europe.
Safety
Safety is a very important factor for me, so while filtering destinations I’ve used a lot the information and advice found at https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice and the Global Peace Index (which is a countries ranking of “peacefulness” index).
Weather
I aim for warm & dry weather, so for all the destinations I used extensively www.accuweather.com to document weather past weather measurements & future predictions. From this effort resulted a few tools:
– a Weather Map;
– a table with recommended travel periods — the Best Conditions tool;
– a table with monthly averages (min./max./avg. temperatures and precipitations) for each destination — the Monthly Report tool.
Appeal
After being a long time devotee of mountains, snow and snowy mountains, I’m now looking forward to dip my ass into warm seas and take naps between palms.
This being said, I’m gonna try to stay close to oceans, seas, islands and warm/hot weather. In the search of an endless summer, so to speak.
