Should You Visit One Country Or Many on Your International Vacation?

Can You Fully Appreciate Travel With a Packed Multi-Country Itinerary?

If you travel infrequently, you may feel that the only way to experience an international vacation is to visit as many countries as possible. You might only get the opportunity to have your passport stamped once a decade.

With only a rare opportunity to visit other countries, you may want to hop, skip, and jump across the continent, visiting and experiencing as many cultures and attractions as possible.

However, you may also find that your whirlwind vacation doesn’t allow you to create solid memories of each location. Can you truly appreciate Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam when you spend just a single day in each city?

Or, should you pick a destination and explore it more in-depth, even if that means you don’t get to see the other countries until your next international vacation?

The answer comes down to a few things. The first is the overall amount of time you intend to spend on the vacation. The second is the makeup of your traveling party. The third how easy or difficult it is to navigate around the different countries you intend to visit.

Let’s explore some of the reasons you might want to go skipping from country to country, as well as some of the reasons it might make more sense to plant your feet for a few days and experience more than just the main tourist attractions in each city.

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The Length of Your Travel Plans

One of the biggest factors that will influence your vacation itinerary is how long you have to explore your destinations. If you’re spending a week in Europe, does it make sense to arrive late on your first day and spend just one full day in Paris before jaunting off to Berlin for another single day of exploration?

Here’s how you might make the decision: do you want to see Berlin more than Paris, but you don’t want to skip Paris entirely? Then spend a day in Paris seeing the biggest sights like the Eiffel Tower and Pont Neuf and then continue on to Berlin for a few days.

However, if both locales intrigue you, expand your time in Paris for an extra day and add some additional sights like the Palace of Versailles and a tour through the catacombs (if you’re legitimately going to Paris, I recommend seeing the catacombs at least! Not to be missed!).

With just a week to spare, I personally wouldn’t visit more than three major cities, should you feel particularly intent on going to as many countries as possible, and I’d also stay in no location for less than two days. Even if you love the idea of seeing as many places as possible, packing up your stuff night after night can get a little tiring.

That’s not to say staying in a new hotel each night isn’t fun (almost every night I spent in Iceland was in a different hotel, actually), but getting to your next destination can eat up a lot of your time, especially if you’re only spending a week. Even if you’re spending a few days more – maybe 10 days – every day you spend traveling is a day you don’t get to see anything up close.

For me, the only time spending a single night in each hotel makes sense is if you’re going on a road trip, and you’ll stop off at various tourist attractions along the way. As you craft your itinerary, try arranging your days so you have at least two days in each town, and see whether that strategy allows you to see more sights.

The Size of the Country

As if it wasn’t obvious, the size of the country (or countries) you’re visiting will have a pretty significant impact on your itinerary. The European continent tends to offer one of the easiest options for country hopping during a vacation, while the North American continent is much harder to cover.

You’ll rarely see a vacation touring Canada, the United States, and Mexico, all in one trip. So, your choice of destinations may come down to the size of the country or countries you’re visiting. But also remember that even the smallest countries can offer a lot of depth and complexity to your itinerary.

You can create a pretty smooth itinerary that takes you to each of the four German-speaking countries of Europe (so that’s Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Liechtenstein), but a similar trip in the United States might feature a few locations on the East Coast. Perhaps Massachusetts, New York, and Washington, D.C. Even though you’re visiting different states, that’s still just a single-country trip.

The same might go for a trip to a large country like India. You might find it a little difficult to country hop from Sri Lanka to India to Bangladesh. There are a lot of miles involved in that trip, and you might not find it feasible unless you’re traveling for two months straight.

The Distance to Your Destination

If you’re traveling halfway across the planet to visit another continent, you might assume that’s it’s worth it to visit multiple countries. You might be flying for fourteen hours straight and taking another three or four-hour flight just to get to your first destination.

Let me share what I experienced when I traveled to Vietnam. Initially, I planned to visit a handful of cities and towns around Vietnam, but I realize that with Cambodia right next door that I could also tour the famous temples of Angkor Wat with a quick hour-long flight from Hanoi in northern Vietnam to Cambodia.

Touring the temples was absolutely incredible, and I’m very glad I stuffed a few days of Cambodia into our Southeast Asia trip. However, I will say that I wish I spent more time in both countries.

Hopping over the border from Vietnam meant I probably missed out on a few things I wanted to see in Vietnam, and spending just a few days in Cambodia meant I didn’t really get to fully experience all the wonder of that country. If I had it to do again, I might focus solely on Vietnam and leave Cambodia for a completely separate trip.

Moral of the story? Just because another country or something else you want to see is just a brief flight away doesn’t mean you absolutely need to experience it. I will return to Cambodia some day, but I’ll definitely spend more time there.

Maximizing Multi Country Travel

If you’re dead-set on visiting multiple countries during your trip, don’t despair. You can make the most of a trip to multiple countries. My biggest piece of advice would be that you should aim to spend no less than two nights in each hotel/motel/B&B you visit during your travels.

The only time I would change this recommendation is if you’re going on a road trip with sights to see along the way. Don’t drive eight hours from city to city with nothing to see in between those cities and just a single night spent in each. Spend a little time getting to know the place and exploring it.

One of the most important decisions you can make when planning an itinerary is making sure that you’re not rushed along from place to place. For example, we stayed at least two to three days in each town we visited in Colombia, and we stayed two or three days in each town we visited in Vietnam. I’d consider two days (or at least two nights) the bare minimum.

Maximizing Single Country Travel

You can apply the same general wisdom regarding single-country travel as you would multi-country travel. Try to avoid staying in a town for just a single night. If your itinerary demands it and you can’t stay more than a single night at some point in your vacation, it’s not the end of the world, but I wouldn’t make a habit of it.

You may find that the best itinerary for your trip actually skips one of the “must see” venues in that country. This occurred with my Morocco itinerary.

When I performed a search for things to see in Morocco, one city that kept coming up was Chefchaouen, a small village in northern Morocco that’s south of Tangier and north of Fez. Although the city looks really cool in photographs (and what am I if not addicted to photography?), I realized that getting there would take an entire day, and the village itself wasn’t very large.

If I was creating an itinerary that lasted two weeks, I’d easily have the time to dedicate an entire day to one small village, but on a tighter timeframe, it didn’t seem prudent to spend so much time traveling to the village with a long drive back to our base in Fez.

As you explore different places to visit on your next vacation, take the time to really research each of the attractions you want to visit and the adventures you want to experience. Having more time to enjoy a particular city or attraction and not feeling rushed along will always make for a better vacation than finding yourself in a different hotel room absolutely every single night.

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