Travel guides
Practical, opinionated guidance on planning a trip that fits what you can actually spend.
How to budget a trip properly
A trip budget is not one number, it is five: flights, accommodation, food, activities and local transport. The common mistake is pricing flights and accommodation, then discovering the daily spending was the larger half. Accommodation is priced per night, not per day — a seven-day trip is six nights — and getting that wrong inflates a budget by a whole night's stay.
Choosing a destination you will actually enjoy
Start from how you want the trip to feel rather than from a place name. Somewhere that suits a slow, food-led week is rarely the same place that suits a short burst of city nightlife. Working backwards from the feeling gets you to better answers than working forwards from a shortlist you inherited from someone else's holiday.
Travel time is part of the trip
A fourteen-hour door-to-door journey costs you two days of a seven-day trip, plus the recovery. Long flights make sense on long trips. On a short break, somewhere three hours away that you can enjoy from the first morning will usually beat somewhere further that you spend two days reaching.
Flexible dates are worth more than most people think
Fares move a great deal across neighbouring departure days. If your dates are genuinely movable, plan the trip first and pick the dates at the point of searching — shifting by a day or two often changes the price more than any other single decision.
Booking: compare before you commit
Search results are a starting point, not a verdict. Prices differ between providers on the same route, baggage is frequently excluded from headline fares, and the cheapest itinerary is sometimes the one with a punishing layover. Check what is included before comparing two numbers.
Destination guides
Written for people deciding where to go, not for people who have already decided.
Malta
Malta, Gozo and Comino — Valletta, the megalithic temples, and where the islands genuinely differ from the postcard.
Sicily
Bigger than it looks. Palermo, the Baroque southeast, Etna and the food — plus why trying to see all of it means spending the trip driving.
Albania
The Riviera, Butrint and the Blue Eye, the Ottoman stone towns, and the Accursed Mountains in the north.
Madeira
A walking island rather than a beach one — levadas, the Pico do Arieiro ridge and the laurisilva forest.
Zanzibar
Stone Town's layered history, the tides on the east coast, and the spice farms and forest inland.
Quiet European coast
Why quiet is a function of season and access rather than obscurity, and which stretches still deliver it.
Planning from where you are
The departure point is half the budget question, so we write for specific origins. If you are starting from Malta, read first about where to find real warmth in winter, how to plan an affordable trip out of the islands, and which parts of Europe stretch a budget furthest. From elsewhere in Europe, the guides to budget trips from London, Dublin, Oslo and Stockholm cover departure markets with very different arithmetic. Further afield we cover Nairobi, New York, Los Angeles, Denver and Sydney — and the full set lives at budget trips by departure city. For how the planner arrives at its numbers, see how the AI trip planner works.