The benefits of Slow travel

Slow travel is a different form of travel than a vacation that tourists do or even digital nomads that are moving around every few weeks. The length of time will vary depending on you. As I’ve gotten in my late thirties and accumulated travel miles and luggage I’ve become semi-nomadic preferring to stay at a location for 1-3 months before changing locations. Other factors that influence my travel schedule may include visas or the weather. There are a lot more benefits to slower travel that I’ll share with you. After a while I’ll get the travel bug or simply get a bored of a location. The benefit of time and location freedom is you can choose where you want to work and live. Let's dive right into the benefits of slow travel.

Get to know people better

You have a chance to get to know people better and longer and grow relationships. This could be expats/digital nomads or locals that live in your location. If you’re always on the go or you are meeting people who are on the go your relationships will remain superficial. It takes time to build and maintain relationships as well as trust. It's difficult to want to invest the emotional energy to get to know people that are always on the go or don't know their plans.

Focus on the Business

No matter how experienced you are traveling is a little bit disruptive. Packing, Getting to the airport, getting to your next location, finding a hotel, finding a good workspace, and so on. Don’t get me wrong. I still love travel and the adventure and curiosity it brings out of me, but I prefer to travel less often these days. I mean how much serious solid work can you really get done while you're at the airport? I do believe in setting up a base in your preferred part of the world for 3 – 6 months. If you need to go for a visa run or get bored you can travel light and go on short trips away from your base. I plan to use Chiang Mai as my base and may do shorter trips in Asia where I’ll travel lighter and do some video footage work.

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Get to know the location better

As I lived in many cities in my lifetime I’ve become more adept at getting to know places. I’ve got processes to help know a city faster and better. One technique I use is to choose strategic accommodation with a good location to begin with. I'll get more into strategic communication in a future post if you want. From there I’ll walk around my area to discover places to eat, buy groceries, do laundry, and exercise. After that I’ll use other transport like a scooter to venture out further to do comparisons and build out my comfort zone. The more time you have the better opportunity you have to get to know a location.

Save money

Traveling does cost money. Flights, taxi’s, expensive airport meals, and visas do add up. If you spent some money to get to your destination then why not focus more time at that destination working on your business? I plan to schedule my planning around visa runs instead of random travel that I did in 2015. In 2015 I traveled to Japan, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Singapore and Vancouver. When doing my finances for 2015 I found my largest expense to be travel.