Travel Maxxing: How to Get the Most Life Out of Seeing the World

Thomas Prommer Hybrid Athlete & Technology Executive Follow on Strava

Published: October 28, 2026

Updated: October 28, 2026

Short answer: travel maxxing means arranging your life to get the most experiences and the widest range of cultures out of travel. Most people treat that as a country count. After 20 years of logging every trip, I think the count is the wrong number. What you get out of travel scales with how deeply you live somewhere, not how many passport stamps you collect.

I keep a travel log the way I keep a training log. It holds 483 trips since 2006, 446 flights and 330 stays, with the nights in each city. This piece is what that log says about getting the most out of travel, and the method I use now. Its sibling, weather maxing, covers the one input I let decide when I move.

What does travel maxxing mean?

The "-maxxing" suffix came from looksmaxxing and now gets attached to anything people optimise: sleep, money, protein, life itself. Travel maxxing showed up in early 2026 trend reports and on Reddit, and it is used in two quite different ways:

• Count maxxing: as many countries as possible, as fast as possible. The goal is the number, and the tools are scratch maps and tracker apps.
• Depth maxxing: as many different ways of living as possible. The goal is understanding, and the tool is time in one place.

I have done both. The first one is more fun to talk about. The second one changed me more.

How many countries have I been to?

34 countries, plus Hong Kong, Puerto Rico and Aruba, on six continents. That count comes from my logged trips and stays. I don't count airports I only changed planes in, so Istanbul and Doha are not on it.

It is a respectable number and not a remarkable one. Serious country counters pass 100. What matters more to me is the shape of the list: it is heavy on Asia and Europe, light on Africa and South America, and that gap is where my list of places still to go comes from.

What did 20 years of travel data teach me?

The log falls into two eras, and the line between them is 2020.

2006 to 2019 was the counting era. I logged 419 trips to about 80 different destinations, and the median trip lasted six days. I was based in New York and later Los Angeles, and the trips were long weekends and work trips: Vienna, Taipei, Hong Kong, London, Stockholm, Medellín, Bogotá and Cartagena, Mumbai and Goa, the Red Sea. Short trips are great for seeing a place. They rarely tell you what living there is like.

Since 2020 it has been the depth era. The pandemic put me in Fürth, where I grew up, for 329 nights of 2020. After that the log changes shape. About four in five of the nights I have logged since 2020 were in just five cities:

That looks like less travel, and by country count it is: 10 or 11 countries a year, not 15. But it is far more culture. A week in Saigon teaches you the sights. Half a year teaches you which unmarked stall has the best food, how the city changes when the rains come, and what District 1 and Thao Dien are each like to live in. A summer in Shanghai taught me a version of daily life with no cards: almost everything, down to the breakfast shops that open at 6:30 and close by 10, is a QR scan. You can't learn that on a six-day trip, because a six-day trip runs on the hotel concierge.

The bases did not replace short trips. They changed where the trips start. Shanghai gave me Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wuxi, Nanjing, Qingdao, Chengdu, Beijing and the desert at Zhongwei, all as short hops. Saigon gives me Nha Trang, Da Nang, Vung Tau and Ho Tram. One base and a ring of short trips around it covers a country better than ten separate holidays.

How do you travel max?

1. Count cultures, not countries. Austria after Germany is a new country and only a slightly different culture. Vietnam after Thailand is a different language, script, food system and history. When you choose the next place, pick the one that is furthest from what you already know.
2. Pick bases by criteria. A base has to work for your actual week: time zone, training, cost, visa and flights. I wrote up how I weigh those five. A city that fails one of them becomes a holiday, not a base.
3. Run short trips out of each base. Once the base is set up, a weekend away costs little. That's where the count grows without the cost of starting over.
4. Rotate with the weather. Every base has its best months. Moving when the season turns keeps the year good and gives you a natural point to move. That's what weather maxing is for, and the weather map scores 82 cities by month.
5. Keep a log. Mine has every trip, flight and stay in one database, with costs and a rating for each place I stayed. Without it I would have told you I had been to more countries and stayed in fewer places. Memory overrates short trips.
6. Price each move. Every move costs working days, a training block, sleep and sometimes a visa clock. If you're working, the time zone is the biggest cost of all. Move when the gain lasts longer than the cost.

What is on my travel bucket list?

Two lists, because they answer different questions.

Places I haven't been: Bhutan, Nepal, Laos, Rwanda, Namibia, Mozambique, Norway and Cyprus, plus Penang, Siargao and the Gold Coast inside countries I know. Most of the list is in Africa and the Himalayas, which is the gap the country table shows. Bhutan stands out: it is the clearest case of a culture that has chosen not to become like everywhere else, and it limits visitors on purpose.

Cities I'm scouting as bases: Tokyo, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Madrid, Melbourne and Perth. I have been to most of them. The question is not whether to see them but whether to live there for a few months. I scout on sunshine, healthy food, a social life and how easy it is to meet active people. Perth in March already passed the weather test.

Can you overdo travel maxxing?

Yes, in the same way you can overdo any maxxing. The country count is a classic case of Goodhart's law: once the number becomes the goal, you start choosing trips that move the number instead of trips that change you. A flight to a microstate for one night adds a country and teaches you almost nothing.

The other trap is the hedonic treadmill. The fifteenth beach stops feeling like the first, and the answer is not a sixteenth beach. It is a different kind of experience: a language, a long stay, a race abroad or a friend who lives there. Travel maxxing works best as one part of a balanced life, not the whole of it. The friends you never see twice and the training block you keep restarting are costs too.