Map of Travel Destination Ideas

This is fulfilling my idea of a map where you can look at a country or area and instantly see great travel recommendations. I think this is so useful for anyone planning travel, that we will eventually put it on the Resource page.

As part of this, I’m including my new project to create a map of curated travel recommendations.

Currently, the other filters, which provide the majority of destinations, are 1) all the National Parks in the world, and 2) all the Unesco World Heritage Sites.

I’ll start by just showing the map, and explaining a little more about it.

The Map Of Travel Destination Ideas

Again, you can use the following filters or include them all:

• Map of The World’s National Parks
• Map of Unesco World Heritage Sites
• Map of our best personal travel recommendations

Click to expand in the top right and see the filters.

About The Map

A curated list of Travel Recommendations

For the curated list of travel recommendations, I’m relying partly on picking Stefan’s brain, of RapidTravelChai (who we just hosted on episode 3 of the Travel Is Free Podcast – which I’ll post about tomorrow).

Stefan has been to 192 of the 193 UN Countries, only missing Syria. Stefan is extremely well-traveled and I always love his travel recommendations, and I’ll try to continue to pick his brain.

In general, I try not to write about places I don’t have great advice for and/or didn’t have an amazing time in. For example, I’ve been to Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Honduras and haven’t written about those destinations, because I don’t have a lot to say or strong opinions.

On the other hand, I recently raved about the Havasupai Falls and the Swiss Alps. Those are the kinds of destinations I’m recommending.

I also will try to update with more specific recommendations. For example, I even put on the map of recommendations the Alpine Slide (a downhill cart in the alps) that I recently wrote about and loved. If you’re in that part of Switzerland, I’d highly recommend visiting that.

And that’s the goal of this map! So anyone can look at a place and get great ideas.

Mapping Unesco World Heritage Sites

I’ll note two things.

1) Unesco sites can be hit/miss, at least in my opinion.

This map is to give ideas, then even a simple Google image search can sometimes let you know if the destination is up your alley and worth traveling to.

2) It can be hard to map.

For example, there are a series of (literal) markers across Sweden that look little stones. Tons of em, often in the middle of nowhere. I made the decision not to map out every stone.

Again, this is really a map of travel ideas, not a Unesco resource.

Map of all the National Parks in the world

Not all national parks are created equal.

For example, Israel has designated 60-some national parks, and Papua New Guinea has a few… Despite the fact that Israel has relatively little natural gems compared to the Papua, which is a giant Pacific island with crazy beautiful diving, mountains, and rain forests with tons of rare animals.

I’d Google any park before visiting.

Conclusion

The end result hopefully will be useful.

Example: Albania

Below is the map with just Unesco and National parks on the left.

On the right is the map with my personal recommendations…

All but two of my personal recommendations were on their list, and one of them (the “Blue Eye”) was a site within Theth National Park.

This is a country where we saw a lot of truly great destinations, and they were all on the map.

I’m excited about this project, and I hope others find this useful in planning their personal travel!