Exotic holiday destinations: the most exotic places to travel

Lists of the most exotic places in the world are usually written without reference to where the reader is starting from, which makes them decorative rather than useful. This one is written from Ireland, so it is organised around the two things that actually decide whether a trip happens: how many connections it takes, and which months are ruled out.

The five below are not a ranking and they are not exhaustive. They are the destinations where the combination of routing from Dublin, season and cost on the ground makes a trip realistic on ordinary annual leave, which is a much shorter list than the world offers. It is a shorter list than it was, too: the routes that made a place reachable in a single hop are the same ones that created and then dissolved the jet set. Closer to home, the islands off the Galway and Clare coast are the one destination on this site whose season is decided by a ferry timetable rather than by weather: the Aran Islands. The one destination that resists every shortcut is covered on its own: flights from Ireland to Australia take two sectors and about six days of any holiday before anything is seen.

Every destination here is somewhere the journey is part of the decision. That is a narrower definition of exotic holiday destinations than the brochures use, and it filters out most of what a search returns.

Exotic holiday destinations sort themselves out quickly under one rule: a week of holiday per connection. It is crude and it works. A destination reachable with one connection from Dublin justifies itself on ten days; a two-connection destination needs a fortnight before the flying stops dominating the trip.

The second filter is season, and it is stricter than most people expect. For the most exotic places to travel from Europe, the usable window is frequently five or six months wide, not twelve. A destination is not a year-round option just because flights operate year-round.

A third practical filter, easy to forget: whether the destination has a usable second week. Some of these places give you everything in ten days and then repeat themselves; others open up the longer you stay. Kerala and East Africa reward a second week. A single Caribbean island generally does not, which is why island-hopping exists there and not elsewhere.

Applied together, those filters cut a list of exotic holiday destinations down to about five that make sense from here. The third filter is what changes on arrival. Somewhere genuinely different demands more of the first two days than a European city break does, which is an argument for fewer, longer trips rather than more, shorter ones.

The most exotic places to travel from Ireland are closer than they were. Long-haul routing out of Dublin has improved considerably over the past decade, and a destination that once meant two connections may now mean one. That single change is what moved several of the exotic destinations to travel to from the aspirational column into the feasible one.

Two connections is the practical ceiling for most people. Beyond that the journey stops being a means of getting somewhere and becomes a feature of the holiday in its own right, which some travellers enjoy and most do not. It is worth knowing which of the two you are before booking a routing with three legs.

Dublin's structural advantage is on the western routes rather than the eastern ones: United States border preclearance operates there and at Shannon, so immigration and customs are completed before departure. For anything connecting onward inside the United States, that removes the most common cause of a missed connection.

For eastbound exotic destinations to travel toward, the practical decision is which hub to route through, and the answer is usually whichever gives the longest connection window rather than the shortest total time. A ninety-minute connection that fails costs a day; a three-hour connection that holds costs ninety minutes.

The mechanics of surviving the flying part are covered separately in how to stay comfortable during a long flight.

Fare comparison is the least useful part of planning a long trip, because the fare is rarely the largest variable. Three others move the total more.

Ground costs diverge enormously. Two destinations with identical airfares can differ by a factor of three once you are there. Southern India is the clearest example in the other direction: a higher fare than the Caribbean, and a daily cost low enough that a fortnight often works out cheaper overall.

Season sets the price more than the destination does. The same island in shoulder season and in peak season are two different products at two different prices. For most of the destinations here the shoulder weeks at either end of the usable window are both cheaper and quieter, and the weather penalty is smaller than the saving.

Connection quality is worth paying for. A cheaper itinerary with a ninety-minute connection and a separate ticket is not cheaper if it fails, and separate tickets mean the second airline owes you nothing. On two-connection routings this is the single most consequential decision in the booking.

Time off is the real currency. For most people the binding constraint is annual leave rather than money, which reframes the whole comparison: a destination that costs two extra days of transit costs two days of the thing you are actually spending. Judged that way, a nearer destination for longer usually beats a further one for the same total time away.

The one place to economise without cost is the return leg. Arriving home tired is a different proposition from arriving somewhere tired, so the overnight, awkward, cheaper option is usually the right one going back and the wrong one going out.

A page listing the most exotic places in the world should probably admit that for a surprising share of trips, the right answer is not to take one.

The arithmetic is simple. A fortnight in Kerala involves roughly two days of travelling and two days of adjusting, which leaves ten. The same fortnight spent on the west coast of Ireland involves no time zones, no jet lag and no transit, which leaves fourteen, and the landscape at Slieve League or on Achill is not a consolation prize.

There is a second version of this argument that is less obvious. Long-haul trips tend to be taken rarely and planned heavily, which loads them with expectation that a fortnight cannot always carry. A shorter trip taken three times a year accumulates more actual travel than one expedition does, and it fails more gracefully when the weather does not cooperate.

None of that argues against the destinations above. It argues against treating distance as a proxy for value, which is exactly what a ranked list of the most exotic places encourages.

The honest split is by what you want changed. If you want a different climate and a different culture, the distance buys you something the alternative cannot. If you want space, weather you can dress for and a road with nothing on it, that is available three hours from Dublin, and it is covered in the Wild Atlantic Way route guide.