Randomly Pick Your Next Travel Destination With These 5 Sites

When you can’t decide where to travel next, let fate pick the destination. You could spin a globe and stab your finger at a place to stop it. Or you could use these cool sites to tell you where to go just as randomly.

This isn’t the ideal solution for those who travel infrequently or are not adventurous. A random pick isn’t for the faint of heart. But it’s a journey, an adventure into the unknown, a kind of unresearched romance that you don’t easily get in the modern world.

1. Earth Roulette: Click a Button, Find All the Research You Need

Earth Roulette is for the confused wanderer who doesn’t want to think. Click a button and you’ll get a suggestion for a country to visit, along with all the research you would need for it.

You start off with a quick introduction about the country and why you should go there. Next, there is a slideshow of photos of the country, sourced from users of 500px. After all, you need to see if you like it. The rest of the page is filled with the major cities and attractions in any recommended country, all powered by Wikivoyage, the Wikipedia-run travel site.

Earth Roulette also gives quick links to book a flight or a hotel with SkyScanner, the best flight ticket app, and Booking.com, the best hotel search engine. And just in case you don’t like the recommended country, click “Spin Again” to find a new random destination.

2. Travel Spin: Vacation Destinations and a Journey Planner

Travel Spin works just like Earth Roulette, but focuses on recommending cities or locations instead of countries. The page is filled with pictures from 500px, along with a small introduction to the place.

What sets it apart is the built-in journey planner. The first time you visit, grant Travel Spin access to your location or enter your city of departure. Now, every time you spin, the site will generate all the ways you can reach the destination from where you are. This includes a combination of flights, ships, trains, buses, and taxis.

You get total travel time, the cost of travel, and the distance as a snapshot. It also expands how this was calculated in each leg of the journey. Travel time and cost is an important factor in deciding where to go, so this summary is quite helpful.

3. Destination Darts: Throw Darts at a World Map to Get Multiple Destinations

I wish I had a large map of the world to throw darts at, which decides the country or city I travel to next. Destination Darts is the next best thing without that apparatus.

Select the whole world map or a region: Africa, Oceania, Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Antarctica. You can even select countries as sub-regions if you want. Then click the “Throw Dart” button and the site will randomly plant a dart on the map. On the left, you can see the exact name of the city, country, and its coordinates.

But here’s the cool part. You can keep clicking “Throw Dart” as many times as you want, and Destination Darts will track a history of all your darts. It’s a nice way to get multiple random destinations quickly. After that, you can safely research your holiday destinations before booking.

4. Atlas Obscura’s Unusual Trips: Cheat Sheet to Offbeat Ideas

Cliched travel destinations often sound boring, which is why you skip them. Atlas Obscura specializes in finding offbeat travel ideas in popular cities or countries. And its packaged Unusual Trips is a cheat sheet to offbeat ideas.

Unusual Trips is a paid tour, so you are free to buy it from them and go with other people. Otherwise, if the dates or cost isn’t working out for you, you can check out the entire itinerary of each Unusual Trip to plan your own trip there. These cheat sheets are the easiest ways to plan your travels.

Browse through both upcoming trips as well as tours already concluded. There are enough travel ideas here to satisfy the desires of every wandering soul.

5. Adioso: Pick Dates and Type of Destination for an Array of Flight Deals

Adioso started off as an essential site for backpackers to find cheap flight deals. But today, it has morphed into something much more useful any type of traveler.

Visit the main page and start selecting from the criteria. Pick your departure city, departing date, and a type of destination. Types include cities, countries, continents, or just “anywhere” in the world. Adioso also has customized “wanderlists” such as destinations for active travelers, family friendly vacations, wildlife experiences, and so on. Check these out, it can be a good way to filter your travel options.

Once you have your criteria, Adioso’s search engine will spit out all the travel options. And this is where the randomness takes over. You will find so many places that you have never even heard of, as well as those you’ve heard of but always thought to be expensive. But since Adioso has already taken care of finding the cheapest flights for you, half your troubles are over.

Let Someone Else Make the Decision for You

A couple of new travel agencies actually try to bring an element of surprise into your travel. Both Pack Up + Go and AnyWhr require a few details from you, after which they’ll mail you flight tickets, a custom itinerary, foreign exchange, electronic visa papers, and all other such details. All you have to do is show up at the airport. Cool, eh?

Of course, if randomness is not your thing, you can still try out other decision-making tools for travel destinations.