Hi, I’m Shannon O’Brien. Welcome to my travel website.

I hope it helps you plan a badass vacation.

I hope you find the beauty in the world that I have found looking for the best destinations in the world.

I do my best to scientifically approach finding the best attractions. An impossible task, to be sure…

But I’m gonna do it anyway.

Here’s the methodology I use to find “the best” that earth has to offer:

I pull data from the top 10 search results for different categories. Some examples include:

  • Best destinations in the world
  • Best attractions in the USA
  • Best destination cities in the world
  • Best trails in the USA
  • Best beaches in the world

2. I take all those attractions, and rank them by the number of times they are mentioned across the top 10 search results for each category.

3. I remove the outliers, meaning those destinations only mentioned once as being best destinations. They are no longer considered best of destinations. Throw ’em out.

4. My husband collaborated with me and created a computer program that results in a ranked list of the best destinations in the world, in order of popularity.

5. I take that generated list and change the weights of rankings based on global indexes that rank the relative safety of that destination on the following criteria:

  • Human rights score
  • Homicide rate
  • Freedom (political/economic)

6. I make a travel itinerary based on all highest rated and most mentioned attractions for each region on the narrowed down list.

So that’s the methodology.

I hope you have a fun time hunting down the awe-inspiring beauty contained within our own planet. I hope you hug a tree and feel, just for a second, that the tree hugged back.

Safe travels,
Shannon O’Brien