When planning your trip you’ll be deciding where you want to spend the time of your life. It’s important to make decisions about where you want to go based on your choices, not what other people think you should do.

When you’re planning an around the world trip you’ll probably get a list of suggestions from everyone you know about places to go in the world, because either someone told them or they had a great time when they were there. Or else you’ll read travel blogs with their top 10 destinations. But there’s the rub. That’s them, and you are, after all, you.

If you’ve wanted see the Pyramids of Giza since you were little, go to Cairo. If you saw a picture of the Great Barrier Reef and daydreamed about it since then, go to Cairns.

There’s no question you’ll have a more gratifying experience in a place of your dreams than some out of the way spot where one of your friends went once.
Tick off the destinations on your bucket list first, your must-sees, then move to places someone else told you about. Even if they’re touristy. Even if they’re on the so-called beaten path. Living out a longstanding dream will be more of a payoff than challenging someone else’s opinion about what is an what isn’t amazing.

After you’ve exhausted your must-sees, move on to your like-to-see’s.

Once you have managed to get all your must-sees into your itinerary and it miraculously remains within your budget, time to get those other places in as well, you’re friends’ suggestions and the ones the travel writers told you about.

This is the next step in the planning process. Play around with TripPlanner to see what adding extra destinations does to the total trip cost. You can also ask your Travel Planner to recommend places that will keep the total cost within your budget. Stopovers are a great way to see additional places with little or no impact on the final price. They may not be places you expected or even wanted to go but can add a rich new experience to your journey when all is said and done.