Hello Travelers!

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about how we pick our next destinations, especially since we’ve been travelling non-stop for over two years now, and we’ll get to it in this email. But first, we wanted to briefly share our thoughts about a problem we’ve noticed as we travel more and more.

In this week’s newsletter:

• 🌍 What happens when everyone discovers the same place?
• 🧭 How do we choose our next travel destination?
• 💬 And we’d love to hear from you

What happens when Everyone discovers the same place?

Last week we hinted at how we didn’t particularly enjoy our time in Lisbon.

“But everyone is going there and seems to rave about it… so what happened?” And it got us thinking… What happens when everyone discovers the same place?

In Lisbon, for example, we noticed that prices were very high compared to its neighbours like Spain, France and Italy. In our experience, just getting a latte would often cost around €4.50 or more. A meal for two with just a main dish and maybe one shared glass of wine would often cost us around €60.

According to a recent analysis, Lisbon is now ranked among Europe’s LEAST affordable major cities, where a Lisbon resident would need to spend more than 110% of their income to rent a typical one-bedroom apartment in the city centre. When everyone discovers the same place, an influx of international buyers and digital nomads, combined with the growth of short-term rentals and tourism, can contribute to neighbourhoods becoming gentrified, with locals increasingly being priced out.

And as we’re sitting here in Lisbon, we realize that as travellers, we are part of the problem too.

For this reason, when we pick destinations, we make every effort to travel as responsibly as possible, reducing the negative impact as much as we can. We focus on:

• spending money at locally owned restaurants and family-run companies (instead of big chains),
• supporting less-travelled areas that are happy to have tourists (instead of the overrun areas)
• travelling during the off-season (when business is slower)
• and adapting ourselves to their local way of life.

But at a deeper level, as travel bloggers, we have another struggle: we want to share beautiful and less-travelled places with you, but at the same time, we don’t want to contribute to the same gentrification and overcrowding happening there. Because ultimately, it is someone’s home.

And honestly, we don’t have the perfect answer to that yet.

After all, we’re lucky enough to see so much of the world. The least we can do is try to leave the places we visit a little better than we found them.

🧭 So how do we actually choose our destinations?

We get asked this a lot: How do we pick our destinations?

Ultimately, we love travelling to places that are off-the-beaten-path, authentic, and allow you to truly experience something unique, rather than just sightsee. So we often base our decisions on a totally unique experience that you can have there, rather than picking a country first.

And the keyword is “experience.” Because just looking at an attraction is not the same as actually participating in a journey.

When we visited Kyrgyzstan, we wanted to see the famous Song Kul Lake. We could’ve just hired a private car to bring us there in a few hours, but instead, we turned it into a 3 day horseback trek, sleeping in some of the most stunning and vast empty plains in nomadic yurts.

That turned a quick ‘sight’ into a full-on journey.

We connected with the horses, learned to ride, lived with the local families, and spent the night stargazing.

In Vietnam, yes, we absolutely loved exploring the food and local life, but one of the reasons we went back was to do an expedition into their incredible caves. This adventure took us out of our comfort zones, connected us with the local culture, supported local villages, and allowed us to see something that you can find almost nowhere else in the world. We could’ve just done some other cave in Phong Nha as a day trip, but it just wouldn’t have been the same.

Picking these experiences allows us to travel intentionally, where the experiences really have an impact on us while also supporting local communities. And more often than not, these are the experiences that end up leaving a truly lasting impression on us.

The experience becomes the memory, rather than just the place.

This is actually why, on our travel blog, we have an entire page dedicated to unique “experiences” around the world. In this way, you can pick your next adventure based on the experience you want, rather than simply picking a country.

💬 How About You?

What’s one travel experience that has stuck with you long after the trip ended?

It doesn’t have to be the most impressive thing you’ve ever done. Sometimes it’s the random experiences we never expected that end up becoming our favourite memories.

And if you’ve been to Lisbon, we’d also love to hear what you thought! Did you love it, hate it, or fall somewhere in between? 😅

Hit REPLY and tell us about it.

WaylessTravelers