About MyNextDestination
MyNextDestination is a recommendation engine for two questions most travellers and would-be expats ask sooner or later: where should I go on my next trip? and where should I live next? Both questions get the same treatment — answer a short quiz, get ten ranked destinations, read the reason for each.
The two modes use the same engine but different weights. Travel mode emphasises climate, interests, language access, and what we call calibration — places similar to those you already love. Relocate mode adds budget fit, career fit, tax and visa pathways, planned length of stay, and lifestyle context like family situation and public-transit needs.
How the engine works
The engine is a pure function. It takes your quiz answers and the city dataset, and returns a ranked list with per-dimension scores so the result is auditable. No black box.
For each city, the engine scores around a dozen dimensions: climate fit, urban density fit, pace fit, nature access, budget fit, language match, interests match, career fit, values fit (safety + LGBTQ+ acceptance), tax fit, visa fit, lifestyle context, and calibration against the cities you tell us you've loved or disliked. Each dimension is a small, transparent function that we can tune in isolation.
Hard filters run first: cities where your passport's visa is impossible, cities clearly over budget, regions you've excluded, or required tags you've insisted on. Then the remaining cities are scored, weighted (with mode-specific defaults), and sorted.
A language model writes the final per-place rationale — but only using facts that the engine has already computed. The LLM does not select the cities or invent details. If no model key is present the system uses deterministic templated text instead.
The dataset
We currently cover ~148 cities across every continent. Major capitals are present, but so are small towns and off-beat places — mountain villages, surf towns, wine country, spiritual hubs, overlooked capitals. We try to keep the list interesting rather than generic.
Numbers are approximations curated by hand from public sources (Numbeo for cost of living, World Bank for macro indicators, OpenWeather for climate, government immigration sites for visa info, OECD for taxes). They are meant to be calibrated against each other rather than read as absolute truths.
About thirty cities — the ones a real relocator researches first — also have curated visa and tax overviews. Digital-nomad visa names, income minimums, residency timelines, top income tax rates, special regimes like Portugal's NHR or Estonia's territorial corporate tax. Always verify with the official source; rules change.
What this is not
Not a directory of cities to scroll through. Not paid placement — no city pays to rank higher. Not legal, tax, or immigration advice. We don't sell your quiz answers or your email if you sign in.
And not a replacement for actually visiting. The quiz is a shortlist generator. The point of the explanations and the deep-dive pages is to help you decide which two or three cities to spend a real week in before making a real decision.