How we decide
A site that tells people when to fly owes them the working.
travel when everyone else waits.
The three marks
★ Cheap sweet spot. The months this site exists for: the peak has passed, prices come down, and the weather is still worth having. Same country, cheaper month, fewer people. These are deliberately separate from the peak months — the gap between the two is where the savings live, and pretending they're the same thing is how travel marketing works. We don't.
✓ Peak season. A country at its peak: the most reliably good weather it has — dry seasons, bearable heat, the windows locals would pick — and the crowds and prices that come with being the month everyone else picks too. Peak is a condition, not a recommendation.
✕ Avoid. Monsoon peaks, dangerous heat, or the month everyone regrets. If a country has one, we say so plainly rather than sell you a washout.
No mark means in-between: fine to go, no strong pull either way. Every month is one of these four states — an unlabelled month would be us not doing the work.
A month is never both green and yellow. That's the whole idea.
Where it comes from
Compiled from climate records and regional tourism seasonality, then checked by hand, country by country. Last full check: August 2026. When we start travelling in 2027 we'll be correcting these from the road — the site exists because we're using it.
Coastline figures are the CIA World Factbook's, used as published (public domain). The Factbook counts the Caspian Sea as a lake, so Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan appear as landlocked; we print its figure rather than our own opinion.
The price bands
Every country carries $ to $$$$: how it compares with the other 195 for daily travel costs — beds, food, getting about, not flights. $ means among the cheapest countries to travel; $$$$ means among the most expensive. It is a comparison, not a price.
Why no figures? Because we haven't verified any yet, and guessed daily budgets are how travel content lies politely. When we're on the road from 2027 we'll publish the numbers we actually paid, and nothing before then. Until that day the honest answer to "what does it cost" is the comparison above, said plainly.
Coverage, stated plainly
Season research is complete for 176 of 196 countries; cheap sweet spots for 149; price bands for all 196. A country we haven't finished says so on its page. Partial coverage stated plainly beats full coverage invented.
What we refuse to do
We never summarise government safety or entry advice — we link to the official pages and stop. We never publish a price we haven't verified. Rankings are never influenced by commission: if a link earns us anything it's labelled "Ad", and the order things appear in is decided before money enters the room.
When we get it wrong
We do. The useful question is what happens next.
We won't publish a number we can't stand behind. That isn't a slogan — the site is built so it fails to publish rather than publish a figure our own data doesn't support. If a page claims a count, the build checks it against the dataset and refuses to produce the site if the two disagree. The same goes for cost bands, for the domain every page says it lives on, and for how far a country's capital can plausibly sit from the country. Each of those checks exists because that exact thing went wrong once and shipped.
Where we don't know, we say so. Four countries have no emergency number we could establish, and their pages say that rather than printing one that might not answer. A visible hole beats a plausible filling.
Anything that could have changed a decision you made gets published. Not quietly edited — written up on our changelog, saying what was wrong, what it is now, and when it changed. If a reader found it, we say a reader found it. That record is the only part of this page you can actually check, which is why it exists.
Found something wrong? Tell us — you don't need to prove it, pointing at it is enough and we'll do the checking.