The “choose-your-next-location” algorithm

This post is part of my 200 words per day challenge that I am sharing publicly on Twitter in order to improve my writing and develop a writing routine. Feel free to join and comment.

I do not travel simply for pleasure. Or for the sake of traveling. Travel is my tool to become a better human, and to reach mastery in my art (software).

Cost is the only factor that sets me on a destination rather than another, for the exception of friends and family.

Rent, food and transportation are my 3 biggest expense categories, so I assess the potential costs according to them. On the other hand, food costs and transportation costs always end up proportional to housing costs, so I just narrow down my researches to the locations with the best ratio between housing costs and quality of life.

Then, I head down to Airbnb and start looking up places.

I book places for a duration of one month. Not only it is just enough to get an idea of the location and decide if I want to stay or not, but it also allows me to get a monthly discount on the rent. My housing budget for a month is 570$ top. I use 5 filters on Airbnb to cover all my needs: entire place (mandatory in my experience if you need to get some serious work done), kitchen, laundry, WiFi and workstation. Finally, I browse places starting from the nearest and choose where the quality of life is the best (usually city centers but if the area is well connected it doesn’t matter).

Book. Enjoy. Repeat.

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