How To Choose The Ultimate Travel Destination – The Art of making Tough Decisions

Travelling in Europe

by Marc Valentine

After I announced to Anna my partner-in-absence – that I had booked one-way flights to Bangkok & we got passed the questions & objections you would expect after a massive announcement like “honey were putting our life on hold to travel the world”

Questions like…
• Have you gone mad?
• How are we going to pay for this sabbatical?
• What about all our stuff – our house. Our car. Our furniture?
• What am I going to tell my work?

The next topic up for discussion was…

So were really going to do this – but you want to go to Asia & I want to go to Europe…

Where exactly are we going to travel to & how do we decide on the destinations
when we both want different things?

I wanted to go backpacking through Southeast Asia because its…

• A really cheap place to travel
• There’s stacks of countries & different cultures in Asia &
• I wanted to do Thailand’s islands properly (what’s properly you ask? At least a month of sun, scuba diving & spending entire days in a hammock 🙂

Anna wanted to Travel Through Europe again because she loves the…

• Food & Wine
• Language
• Culture
• & The history
• (mostly the wine though)

After discussing possible travel destinations for a few hours we decided to kick off our Asian leg of the trip in Thailand.

And for the European section we would need to decide between basing ourselves in Italy or Spain.

To reach an agreement & decide on our final travel destinations we got some help from…

My favourite online decision making tool…

Need Some Help Making That Big Travel Decision

The Tool That helped Us Decide Where To Travel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It helps you make those tough decisions – by entering in the factors you deem most important to whatever decision your trying to make.

For us, the most important factors for our upcoming travel were…

• Weather
• Culture
• Food
• Affordability
• Distance to other countries & cultures (so we can take side trips)

Once you’ve got all the factors entered that are most important to you.
You then go through each one & allocate exactly how important that factor is to you from 1 to 10.

For me weather was super important, I rated that a 10.

Beach in Phuket Thailand

Getting Some Sun On A Beach in Phuket Thailand

 

I’m Australian, I like the sun – & I wasn’t about to spend my leave-of-absence shivering my ass off in some country town in Russia in the dead of winter.

Affordability was pretty high up there in importance for me too – I wanted to get the longest possible trip ouf of the money we had put aside for travel – I gave affordability an 8 out of 10.

You do this for each factor you decided was a “biggie” for you, and the site goes and automatically tallies up the results for you.

The final decision is simple. The largest number wins.

 

We both went & rated our most important factors (we each did this alone so we there was no chance of us influencing each others decision) & then we compared our results.

Anna & I both rated Thailand higher than Cambodia & Vietnam. & Spain in Europe came out victorious over Italy – because its closer to other countries we haven’t traveled to yet, like Portugal & Morocco.

So that’s were we intend to base ourselves and spend the most time on our trip (we’ll soon see if that’s how it works out).

Until next time here’s to being absent

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