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I Stopped Trying to
"Do" Countries.
My Trips Got Better.
Why slowing down is the most underrated travel strategy — and the most effective one for your budget
Three years ago, I did five countries in nine days. I have photographs to prove it. I have almost no memory of being there.
I'm being honest about this because I think a lot of people have had the same experience and haven't quite named it yet. You plan a trip for months. You save for it. You show up. You move through it at speed because that's what the itinerary requires. You come home with a full camera roll and an odd sense of emptiness — like you watched the trip rather than had it.
The five-countries-in-nine-days trip was France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and a day in Luxembourg that I genuinely could not place on a map for several weeks afterward. I saw things. I was technically there. But I was also always about forty-five minutes away from the next train, and the question "do we have time?" was the organizing principle of the entire experience.
I came home exhausted. I vowed to do it differently. I have not gone back to the old way since, and I won't.
What Slow Travel Actually Is
Slow travel has a definition problem. Some people use it to mean "traveling slowly" in the literal sense — by train, by bicycle, on foot. That's part of it, but not the whole thing. Others use it to mean some kind of spiritual approach to movement. That's closer but gets vague quickly.
The definition I use is simpler: slow travel means spending enough time in one place that you stop being a tourist and start being a temporary local. That's it. The number of days this requires varies by destination — three days in a small village versus a week in a large city — but the shift is the same. You find the bakery. You have a regular table at a café. The woman who runs the corner shop recognizes you. You stop consulting Google Maps for every block.
When that shift happens, something changes about the quality of your attention. You notice things you couldn't have noticed while moving. And — critically, especially if you're thinking about budget — you start making decisions like a local rather than a tourist. Which turns out to be significantly cheaper.
The Numbers — Because This Is Real
Let me show you the cost comparison from two actual trips I took to roughly the same region in Portugal — one in the old way, one in the new way. Both trips were ten days. Both were solo.
The difference is €885 — more than half the cost of the fast trip. And that's before accounting for the weekly discount most accommodations offer (typically 15–25% off the nightly rate for stays of 7+ nights), the ability to cook some meals in a kitchen, and the natural reduction in impulse spending that happens when you're not constantly in "tourist mode."
Why It's Cheaper — The Actual Mechanics
Transport costs collapse
Moving between cities is expensive. Every inter-city journey has a ticket cost, a taxi or bus to/from the station, and often a half-day of lost time. When you stay somewhere for five days instead of one, you make that journey once instead of five times. Over a ten-day trip, the transport savings alone are often €100–200+.
Accommodation rates drop significantly
Weekly rates at apartments and guesthouses are almost always 15–30% cheaper than the nightly rate multiplied by seven. This exists because hosts strongly prefer less turnover. You benefit from their preference. I've never stayed somewhere for a week and paid full nightly rates — there's always a discount, usually offered without asking.
You stop eating in tourist restaurants
This one is huge and rarely discussed honestly. On your first day in a city, you eat wherever is visible, convenient, and has a menu in your language. By day four, you know where the workers eat lunch. By day six, you know the family that runs the market stall and what time they restock the bread. The food gets better and the prices drop, simultaneously, simply because time has given you information.
In almost every city in Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, the municipal market — not the tourist market, the actual food market — is the cheapest and best place to eat lunch. You won't find it on your first day. You will find it by day three if you're paying attention. A week in one place guarantees you find it.
What You Actually Experience Differently
I was in Seville, Spain, for eight days last spring. On day one, I visited the Alcázar and the Cathedral — the big things, the things you're supposed to do. They were magnificent. They were also exactly what I expected from photographs.
On day four, I found a bar in the Triana neighborhood where the TV was always showing football, the tapas came automatically with every drink, and the average age of the clientele was sixty-five. I went back every evening. On day six, the man behind the bar called me by my name when I came in. On day seven, his brother-in-law, who had lived in Paris for twenty years and spoke perfect French, sat down and we talked for two hours about the future of the city, the old buildings being replaced by hotels, and what the neighborhood was like when he was young.
That conversation is one of the things I remember most clearly from any trip I've ever taken. It cost me a €2.80 beer and the willingness to come back to the same place twice.
How to Structure a Slow Travel Trip
The practical question is always: if I'm only going to two or three places, how do I choose? The answer is to invert the usual travel logic. Instead of asking "what can I see here?" ask "what kind of life can I have here for a week?"
A city with good markets, walkable neighborhoods, a café culture, and interesting day-trip options within an hour — that's a slow travel city. A resort town that exists primarily for visitors, or a place where you'll run out of things to do on day three — that's a day trip destination, not a base.
The Objection I Always Hear
"But I only get two weeks of holiday a year. I want to see as much as possible."
I understand this completely. And I want to push back on it gently, because I think it contains an assumption worth examining: that "seeing more" and "experiencing more" are the same thing. My five-countries-in-nine-days trip proved to me that they are not. I saw more. I experienced, in any meaningful sense, less.
The question isn't how many places can I visit. The question is: what do I want to take home? If the answer is photographs and the ability to say you've been somewhere — fast travel serves that perfectly. If the answer is memories, conversations, the feeling of having genuinely been somewhere — slow travel is the only method I've found that reliably produces it.
The Thing That Actually Changes
I've been trying to articulate this for a few years and I'm still not sure I have the right words. When you slow down, something changes about the relationship between you and the place. You stop being a consumer of the destination and start being a participant in it — briefly, temporarily, but genuinely.
The Seville barman who learned my name did not change my life. But he changed that trip. And that trip changed how I think about what travel is for. And that has, quietly and over time, changed quite a lot.
None of this is available on a nine-day, five-country itinerary. It requires the one resource that fast travel is specifically designed to avoid spending: time.
Spend it. Slowly. In fewer places. It costs less, and it gives more. I am certain of this.
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