Start With What Moves You

Most travel planning starts with a destination. You pick a country or a city, usually one you’ve heard of because everyone else has heard of it, and you build around it. That’s how booking platforms work, how guidebooks are organized, and how the algorithm decides what to show you next. It’s also how millions of people end up taking the same trip to the same places during the same four months of the year.

There is a better question to start with: what kind of experience are you actually after?

Maybe you travel to eat, from street food markets in Southeast Asia to regional cooking traditions across Latin America. Maybe a trip does not feel real to you until you have physically pushed yourself on foot or on a bicycle. Maybe you are the person who will wait in a hide before sunrise for a bird you have read about for years, or the person who wants their travel to directly benefit the local community.

When you start planning with intent instead of geography, destinations you have never considered become obvious, and these places turn out to be exactly the trip you did not know you were looking for.

Each category below is a starting point for thinking about your next trip, with linked stories from the newsletter, original photography from the destinations Scott Monaco covers, and ideas for where these experiences are at their best. Browse the one that fits how you like to travel, or pick whichever one sounds least familiar.

Ready to build a trip around the way you like to travel?