Where to next?
Every destination below links straight into the planning assistant: pick one, and it builds a complete trip proposal — day-by-day itinerary, honest budget, map and booking links. Free, no account needed.
This guide covers a hundred places the Travel Planner assistant can cost from end to end. Every page rests on the same base: measured weather records from the nearest station, month by month, with its distance and the number of years sampled; the airports that serve the place and how far away they really are; the country's price level compared with France, taken from European price indices. Around those figures sits text written and checked by hand — what the place offers, when to go, what you can see in two, four or seven days, how to get there, and where visitors go wrong. Each page carries its own update date. When a figure is missing, the place is not published at all.

Algeria

Austria
HallstattA single lane of houses wedged between a lake and a cliff in the Austrian Salzkammergut, Hallstatt gave its name to an Iron Age culture…
SalzburgSalzburg fits a baroque city centre, a hilltop fortress and Mozart's birthplace into a few hundred metres either side of the Salzach, with its airport…
ViennaAn imperial capital that kept its scale: a ringed centre you can cross on foot, a palace at either end of the day, and coffee…
Belgium

Cape Verde

Croatia

Czech Republic

Denmark

Egypt
AswanAswan marks the end of navigable Egypt, where the Nile splits around granite islands and the desert closes in on both banks. It is smaller…
Sharm El SheikhSharm El Sheikh occupies the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula, where the Gulf of Aqaba opens into the Red Sea. It is a purpose-built…
CairoCairo is not a pretty city and does not try to be. It is enormous, loud, dusty and continuously awake, and the pyramids sit at…
LuxorLuxor occupies both banks of the Nile in Upper Egypt, where the valley narrows between desert cliffs. The east bank holds the living town and…
Ethiopia

France
CorsicaCorsica is a French island in the western Mediterranean, but geologically it is a mountain range that happens to have beaches. Our readings on the…
NiceNice is the main city of the French Riviera, wedged between the Baie des Anges and the first slopes of the Alps. It is warm…
ParisParis is a compact capital: the historic city fits inside a ring road, and most of what visitors come for lies within walking distance of…
Germany
BerlinBerlin is a flat, sprawling capital built around the Spree and rebuilt after every rupture of the twentieth century. Museum Island, the Wall memorials and…
MunichBavaria's capital organises itself around squares, inner courtyards and beer gardens rather than boulevards, with the Alps close enough to fill a day trip. It…
Ghana

Greece
AthensAthens is a dense modern capital wrapped around a limestone rock that has been occupied for millennia. It is also the hottest city in our…
CreteCrete is the largest Greek island, and its scale is the thing you plan around. A mountain spine runs its whole length, the north coast…
SantoriniEverything on Santorini follows from one fact of geology: the island is the rim of a collapsed volcano, so the famous villages sit on a…
Hungary

Iceland

India

Ireland

Israel
JerusalemJerusalem occupies a ridge in the Judaean hills, where a walled Old City of markets and shrines sits inside a modern capital faced almost entirely…
Tel AvivTel Aviv runs along a straight sand shore, backed by a dense grid of white and cream apartment blocks with rounded balconies. At its southern…
Italy
FlorenceFlorence sits in a basin of the Arno valley, ringed by hills that hold the summer heat in and keep the sea breeze out. Its…
RomeTwo thousand years of building are stacked on the same seven hills in Rome, often inside the same block: a Renaissance palace on Roman foundations…
SicilySicily is an island the size of a small country, with Greek temples on one coast, an active volcano on the other and a baroque…
VeniceVenice is built on a lagoon, without a single road for cars, and every movement happens on foot or by boat. That one constraint governs…
Ivory Coast

Jordan
Dead SeaThe Dead Sea is the lowest dry land on the planet, a landlocked salt lake whose surface keeps falling. The Jordanian side is a narrow…
PetraPetra spreads across a whole valley rather than standing as a single monument: several kilometres of carved facades, tombs, a colonnaded street and a Roman-era…
Wadi RumWadi Rum is a protected desert in southern Jordan where sandstone and granite massifs rise straight out of a floor of red sand. There is…
Kenya

Lebanon
BeirutBeirut sits on a headland pushed out into the Mediterranean, with mountains rising immediately behind it. The city is built in layers rather than districts…
ByblosByblos is a small coastal town north of the Lebanese capital, built around an excavated mound that drops straight to the water. A crusader keep…
Madagascar

Malta

Mauritius
ChamarelChamarel is a village on a forested plateau in the south-west of Mauritius, reached by a road that climbs in tight hairpins out of the…
Grand BaieGrand Baie occupies a deep inlet on the northern shore of Mauritius, where the barrier reef lies far enough out to leave a broad sheet…
Port LouisPort Louis is the capital and working harbour of Mauritius, pressed into a narrow shelf between the sea and a wall of jagged volcanic peaks…
Morocco
ChefchaouenChefchaouen climbs the flank of the Rif beneath two bare peaks, and nearly every wall of its old town is painted blue. The medina is…
EssaouiraEssaouira is a fortified Atlantic port whose ramparts face a low line of islands, with a medina laid out behind them on a proper grid…
FezFez stacks three towns into one: a vast walled medina closed to vehicles, a royal quarter added later around a palace and its gardens, and…
MarrakeshMarrakesh stands on a dry plain below the High Atlas, whose snow line is visible from the rooftops for much of the winter. The city…
Namibia

Netherlands

Nigeria

Norway

Oman
MuscatMuscat is not a compact capital but a ribbon of low white districts threaded between bare brown mountains and the Gulf of Oman. Nothing rises…
SalalahSalalah spreads across a coastal plain in southern Oman, pinned between the Dhofar escarpment and the Arabian Sea. Coconut palms, banana plots and frankincense trees…
Poland

Portugal
AlgarveThe Algarve is Portugal's southern coast, and it is really two coastlines in one. West of Faro, limestone cliffs drop into pocket coves reached by…
LisbonLisbon sits on hills above the Tagus estuary, wide enough here to look like a bay. A grid of low ochre blocks rebuilt after the…
MadeiraMadeira is a volcanic island in the Atlantic, Portuguese, steep from the shoreline up. Terraced slopes rise to a laurel forest and a ridge of…
PortoPorto is built on granite, on both banks of a gorge where the Douro reaches the Atlantic. The old quarter drops to the water in…
Qatar

Rwanda

Saudi Arabia
AlUlaAlUla lies in a sandstone valley in north-west Saudi Arabia, where a palm oasis threads for kilometres between eroded orange cliffs. Nabataean tombs are carved…
RiyadhRiyadh stands in the middle of the Arabian peninsula, on a limestone plateau split by the dry course of the Wadi Hanifa. It is a…
Senegal

Seychelles
MaheMahé is the largest of the Seychelles and the one that carries the archipelago's infrastructure: the international airport, the capital, the hospitals, the ferry quays…
PraslinPraslin is the second island of the Seychelles, a low granite ridge with a single loop road around it and a palm forest in its…
Slovenia

South Africa
Cape TownCape Town is wedged between a flat-topped mountain and two very different seas, on a peninsula that runs south into the Atlantic and ends in…
StellenboschStellenbosch lies in a bowl of granite mountains an hour inland from Cape Town, with vineyards climbing the valley floors until the rock stops them…
Spain
BarcelonaThree cities share one strip of Catalan coast here: a medieval core of narrow lanes, the strict nineteenth-century grid of the Eixample with its chamfered…
MadridSpain's capital stands inland on the Castilian plateau, high above sea level and a long way from any coast. It has no great river, no…
MallorcaThe largest of the Balearic islands runs from a limestone mountain range along its north-west shore to a flat, farmed interior and a south-east coast…
SevilleAndalusia's capital lies on the Guadalquivir, an inland river port that once handled the trade of the Americas. Its centre is a compact tangle of…
TenerifeTenerife is the largest of the Canary Islands, Spanish territory sitting far south of the mainland, off the African coast. It is really one big…
Sri Lanka
ColomboColombo spreads along Sri Lanka's western shore, a working port capital of colonial arcades, Buddhist and Hindu temples, mosques and new glass towers rising on…
EllaElla is a single street of a village perched on the southern edge of Sri Lanka's highlands, where the plateau breaks and drops away towards…
KandyKandy sits in a bowl of wooded hills in the middle of Sri Lanka, built around an artificial lake and the temple that holds the…
Sweden

Switzerland

Tanzania
KilimanjaroKilimanjaro rises alone out of northern Tanzania, a snow-capped volcano standing over hot savannah with nothing else near its height for hundreds of kilometres. Trekkers…
ZanzibarAn island off the Tanzanian coast with a Swahili trading town at one end and reef-sheltered beaches all round the rest. The reference station, 6.2…
Tunisia
DjerbaA flat, low island in the Gulf of Gabès, off southern Tunisia, joined to the mainland by an ancient causeway and a ferry. Our readings…
Sidi Bou SaidSidi Bou Said is a clifftop village of whitewash and cobalt blue at the end of the suburban line north of the Tunisian capital, next…
TunisTunis lies between a shallow lagoon and a ring of dry hills: a walled medina at the core, a broad colonial avenue running down towards…
Turkey
AntalyaAntalya stands on a limestone shelf above its own bay, with the Taurus range closing the horizon inland and cliffs dropping straight into the sea…
CappadociaCentral Anatolia, on a high plateau of volcanic ash compacted into soft rock and then eroded into cones, ridges and gorges. People here did not…
IstanbulA strait runs through the middle of Istanbul, and it does more than separate Europe from Asia: it organises the working day. Ferries are the…
PamukkalePamukkale is a village at the foot of a white cliff, on the inland plateau of south-west Turkey. Calcium-laden springs have coated the hillside in…
Uganda

United Arab Emirates
Abu DhabiAbu Dhabi occupies a flat island at the head of the Gulf, tied to the mainland by bridges and to its neighbours by causeways. Nearly…
DubaiDubai sits on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf, built outward from a tidal creek that was once a pearling and trading port. The…
Ras Al KhaimahRas Al Khaimah is the northernmost of the Emirates and the only one where mountains meet the sea. A narrow coastal plain of creeks, lagoons…
United Kingdom



































