How do you choose where to travel next? Or maybe even a more frequent question I get is: “How do you find out about this place?”
Last updated: March 25, 2025
Pick Your Next Travel Destination
Sometimes, a person who asks this question rushes to answer it himself, “Did you see somebody on Instagram raving about this location?”
Considering that nowadays for many the majority of the so-called travel inspirations come from social media, in particular Instagram and less frequently Pinterest, it’s quite common to assume that our choices of the next travel destination are influenced by random strangers’ authentic (and in many cases not so much) experiences.
This is not exactly the case when I pick a destination for us to travel to next.
The majority of my travel inspirations – close to 80% – come from one source. Then I fill any gaps and add more details with ideas that have been stored in my subconscious for a while, waiting for the right time and place to resurface. These secondary units of information may indeed come from various social media platforms. But they are never the main influencers.
In general, I draw my travel inspirations from three sources. I’ll go in the reverse order, starting with my least popular to the favorite ways to choose my next travel destination.
3 SOURCES TO DRAW YOUR TRAVEL INSPIRATION
1. Pictures
Pictures in magazines. Gorgeous photos on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, choose which social media platform you prefer.
Pros
Instagram is in essence a platform to share images and videos in order to inspire. I like to browse through beautiful pictures. I share them on my Instagram page as well. But for the most part, the images on social media don’t inspire or initiate a planning process for my next trip.
I enjoy and appreciate them, but never jump on a plane right away to see that particular place, let alone look for the “most Instagrammable” streets in London or Rome.
With that being said, pictures in magazines or books have a deeper imprint on my subconscious. At one point, I was so impressed with the picture of the Byodo-In Temple on Oahu that I cut it out and glued it onto my vision board. At that time, I didn’t know where that place was and didn’t even bother to remember the name. I wanted to see something similar, sometime in the future, somewhere in the world.
Fast forward a few years and I was standing in front of that same Byodo-In Temple and even took an almost identical picture of it.
Cons
Interestingly enough, pictures, no matter how beautiful, edited, or filtered they can be, can have an adverse effect when choosing the next travel destination.
Several years ago, my Instagram feed was flooded with images from Amsterdam. I’d never been to the Netherlands before. My only close encounter with the country was a few stories my cousin shared after she had visited the Netherlands as a child.
I acknowledged the beauty of the city as it was shown in those pictures. But none of them triggered an emotional response. On the contrary, the more pictures of Amsterdam I saw, the less I wanted to choose it as my next travel destination.
When I finally traveled to the Dutch capital – a trip not really planned – I was smitten. Amsterdam looks sort of one-dimensional in pictures. Beautiful canals, crooked houses, a plethora of bicycles in the streets… It’s all there, in the photos. But the spirit of the city you get to feel by walking in those streets is missing.
I’m not even a city person, but now I’ll go explore more of the capital of the Netherlands any time I get a chance.
In other words, pictures that were supposed to inspire me to make Amsterdam my next travel destination, did the opposite. An accidental trip to northwestern Europe did all the job. And that leads me to my next source of inspiration for travel.
2. Movies
Movies are the second source that triggers my curiosity and, to some extent, inspires me to choose a particular place as my next travel destination. Unlike photos, motion pictures give you a more immersive introduction to a place.
What’s great about the movie, it’s not just a beautiful image, it’s a story. Whether you watch a documentary or a fiction film, you attach a certain feeling to the place it tells you about.
Movies also add volume of information to a place you’ve probably already heard about or been thinking of traveling to. Now you pay even closer attention, add more mental reminders or those bullet points to your itinerary.
I’ve wanted to visit Alaska since I was a kid. If you grew up in Eastern Europe, Jack London’s novels were a part of your mandatory reading curriculum. Normally taking place in snowy wildernesses of Canada and Alaska, his stories are not the most uplifting. But I was hooked.
Around the same time, an engrossing TV series about Alaska came out. (I don’t even remember its title now.) Having these two sources of inspiration made such a profound effect on me that I didn’t waste time and headed to the Last Frontier when the first opportunity arose.
3. Books and Stories
Books are the main source I draw inspiration from for my next trip. 80 to 90% of the places I choose to travel to I learn about through reading. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I completely agree with it. But a visual image alone is not nearly sufficient for me to pick my next travel destination.
There is a bigger story behind every place, and a picture can catch only a glimpse of it. Traditions, cultures, lifestyles, past events – everything shines through a written or narrated story.
A writer doesn’t sell you on that particular destination. She sets the mood of a novel or a nonfiction book. And through this verbal description, you see the raw, unfiltered place that pictures are not always adept at capturing.
Like a local travel guide, a book opens the door to hidden nooks and crannies. It inspires you to go off the beaten path and see the place from a local’s point of view.
How I Plan My Next Trip
For me, books are treasures where inspirations for my next travels are endless. Pretty much every location I’ve been to was inspired by reading.
A lot of people talk about practicality of travel, how to choose the right time, find affordable flights, hotels, etc. I do pay attention to all of these. No, I don’t jump on the plane as soon as I find my new coveted travel destination. I store that place in the back of my mind, let it marinade, so to say. And when all other components of travel fall in place, I know exactly where I want to go and what I want to see and do there.
Once I get the idea of where I want to travel next – mostly from the books – any pictures and stories that I come across later on fit into my travel plans like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Every shrine or trail fills in the missing parts of my future itinerary.
In summary, my main sources of travel inspiration are books and then movies. Pictures in magazines and on social media build up on that curiosity and add density to the place I’m going to travel to next.
