How to Overcome Travel Burnout During Longer Trips

People think non-stop travel is a dream life with no downsides. And whilst I certainly would call it a dream, I would be lying if I said there weren’t periods where travel burnout didn’t kick in.

Travel burnout occurs when you travel at a consistently fast pace, find yourself taking hours-long trips every few days, you become uninspired by places that many dream of visiting and you just crave a bit of the normality you’ve been so desperate to get away from.

As you may have guessed from the name of this website, I’m on an adventure to visit every country in the world. I started travelling long-term from January 2019, albeit with a lengthy Covid-enforced break for a couple of years. But whilst this lifestyle is a dream, I do go through burnout periods where I need to rediscover my love of the game every once in a while.

Slower travel, turning to work, and leaving uninspiring places earlier than planned are amongst my travel burnout recovery strategies. Read on for my list of tips in full to keep the travel bug as strong as ever.

Identifying Travel Burnout

Travel burnout creeps up on you when you least expect it.

You start to feel exhausted, and you’re constantly bored. You’re in a place that many dream of such as Paris or Patagonia, and find yourself more interested in staying in your hotel room doomscrolling through social media rather than exploring picture postcard destinations.

I find that three key factors lead to myself burning out: length of time on the road, low enthusiasm for my current destination, and the environment around me.

By environment, I’m talking about how staying in lower-quality places and penny-pinching to avoid pricy transport fees, whilst booking the cheapest tours over the most enjoyable leads to irritability far quicker than staying in places where you can live in relative luxury, and prioritising enjoyment over living in luxury.

It is far more enjoyable to travel around Bolivia with the budget of a king rather than exploring Switzerland like a pauper.

I’ll give two examples of where I reached burnout point in recent trips.

The first was during a 9-month South America adventure. Now I love South America, and it is by far my favourite continent in the world. But after 8.5 months, home was on the horizon and I became far more interested in seeing family and sleeping in my own bed than exploring the Bolivian pampas and Amazon.

My girlfriend was of a similar mindset, and we found ourselves moaning non-stop during what should’ve been a bucket list adventure through the Bolivian pampas. We just wanted the tour to end.

On one hand, it was pretty much an inferior version of what we had already seen during a magical Venezuelan safari experience. On the other, our minds were already back home and we wanted to get this over and done with.

The previous few weeks had also battered our bodies with high-altitude adventures in Peru and La Paz, whilst illness hit me during a brutal 18-hour bus journey to Rurrenabaque, complete with a typically Bolivian 5-hour roadblock delay.

At least here, burnout struck only right at the end, when we could count down the days until returning home.

The second recent example of travel burnout took place barely 3 weeks into our next adventure: a trip through Europe.

We started in Portugal and loved it, only for our second stop in Rome to be a massive disappointment due to horrific overcrowding, searing hot weather, peak season pricing and just an overall bad vibe.

The next few weeks turned out to be more Rome than Portugal as we went from one place we didn’t love (Switzerland), to another (Austria), and another (Slovakia) and so on.

We find that Europe quickly blends into one with the same pretty towns and the same castles in just about every country. Only the Alps, Norway’s fjords and Iceland’s magnificent natural landscapes offer something different.

We just got incredibly bored and will soon stop travelling around just halfway through our Europe trip.

We find the continent boring and we crave more adventure than this.

Now you may be a Europe lover who feels differently, but for us it isn’t a continent we love, and one where we’ve lost a little of the travel spark.

And to be honest, this is one of the downsides of attempting to visit every country. On one hand I’ve discovered some incredible hidden gems worth visiting, including places such as Brunei and magical Myanmar that may otherwise have never been on my radar.

On the other, I’m yet to visit Belgium or Luxembourg, two European countries I’ve been told are “boring” even by Europe enthusiasts.

Is there really a good reason to visit those countries other than to tick a box?

Anyway, that’s another debate. Let’s get into the main reason you’re here.

How to Overcome Travel Burnout

1) Slow Down the Travels

One thing we’ve been very guilty on our recent Europe trip is fast travel. Switzerland too expensive? Let’s just spend 3 days here. Finding Austria boring? Gone in 3 days.

Half the time is spent on buses or in the case of the two countries mentioned above, using BlaBlaCar to take budget transport in a couple of Europe’s more costly destinations.

In fact we haven’t spent more than 7 days in a single country on this trip.

Compare that to the amount of time spent in my top 5 countries in the world: Argentina (3 months), Peru (5 weeks), Bolivia (2 weeks), Nicaragua (2 weeks) and Colombia (1.5 months).

The longer you spend in a place, the more you get to appreciate it, and the more time you spend exploring rather than bus-hopping. It is also less exhausting.

Take some time to slow down a little and enjoy your surroundings a bit more.

2) Go Home Every So Often

As great as travel can be, nothing can beat going back to your hometown for a few weeks to recharge and reset.

It was great having Dad come to South Korea where I taught English to visit the DMZ and spend a few days together in Japan, but home is where you can see most of your family and friends in a comfortable environment, enjoy familiar foods, and engage in your favourite activities.

Although for me, that means going to Southampton FC games, which is more of a negative than a positive these days…

Chances are your life at home is much less hectic than life on the road. And it’s great to recharge the batteries for a bit.

I always find around 4 weeks is the sweet spot to stay home.

After that, my burnout subsides and I crave adventure once again.

3) Leave Places That Don’t Inspire You

We’ll go back to Austria for an example of this. We spent the majority of our 3 days there in Vienna.

Now Vienna has nice architecture, and I see the appeal for some, particularly fans of classical music given the links to Mozart, Beethoven and the opera scene in general.

But we just weren’t feeling it at all. None of that interests us, we’d seen cool buildings elsewhere, the alps are nice but having lived in the Italian alps back in 2017, they offered nothing new for me, and Austria is an expensive country which isn’t worth staying in if you aren’t enjoying it.

So we decided to spend a couple of nights in Budapest before heading to Slovakia where the U21 Euros were taking place.

It was the right decision. We really enjoyed Budapest, and after heading to Poland, Belarus and Prague, we came back to Hungary’s capital to spend a little more time in one of our happier places.

This was a much better idea than staying in Austria where neither of us felt content.

If you’re in a country or a city or anywhere else you aren’t loving, move on.

4) Travel in Places That Your Budget Allows you to Enjoy

Switzerland was another country we didn’t love. And I don’t blame Switzerland for that. I blame us.

We went to one of the world’s most expensive countries in peak season without booking anything in advance and stayed in the cheapest hostels.

Whilst we enjoyed visiting the Lindt Home of Chocolate in Zurich, we also took an Alps tour that cost over £100 (US$130) each, wasn’t very good, and was a cheap tour by Swiss standards, which meant minimal perks, a low-quality guide and just about no information about the places we visited.

On the flipside, in Argentina we were staying in nice places and spending similar money on mind-blowingly amazing tours of Patagonia.

We also ate world class steak for low prices there, compared to Switzerland where we either skipped lunch, bought supermarket snacks, or turned to the dreaded golden arches to feed ourselves.

My advice would be to avoid countries like Switzerland if you don’t have the budget to really enjoy them. Yes you can visit Switzerland for under £200 (US$260) a day. But you probably won’t enjoy it.

Southeast Asia (minus Singapore and Brunei) and Latin America’s cheapest countries are places where you can have a lot of fun with very little money.

Eastern Europe costs a little more, but it still a more affordable alternative to the rest of the continent.

5) Take Work Months

Unless you have a large source of income, travel will burn through your budget pretty quickly.

Whilst the likes of Central America and Southeast Asia are affordable for a while, travellers in Western Europe, the Caribbean and the Middle East will see their bank balance hammered in no time.

We balance this by pausing for a few weeks every so often to work, save money, and make as much as possible before starting another leg of our travels.

We did this to great success in Brazil at the beginning of 2025. After 5 disappointing weeks in South America’s largest country, we spent a month in Curitiba to work hard and recharge funds.

We paid just £476 (US$620 approximately) split between two to spend one month in a secure apartment building with a gym, swimming pool and workspace as well as nearby all-you-can-eat restaurants for just £6 (US$8) and good local supermarkets.

Our Airbnb host Ivana tried to scam us with a false damage claim when we left, but it was otherwise an excellent decision to stay there (and this particular building, Log Centro, has other hosts too if you wish to stay there).

We will be stopping Bosnia for a few weeks next. Our hope is to have the same success we found in Curitiba and rediscover our love for travel.

6) Do Something Different

With long term travel, you often find yourself doing the same things over and over again.

Another museum, another castle, another jungle… the first one you saw may have been magical, but the 34th perhaps isn’t so exciting.

In that case it’s time to stretch your comfort zone a little further and do something you wouldn’t normally.

Go scuba diving and get your qualifications if you haven’t already, hang out with locals on Couchsurfing, volunteer with Workaway, or simply stay with a nomadic Mongolian family and shear some sheep after sipping on some suutei tsai.

Changing things up (in terms of both where you travel, and what you do) will hopefully reignite the travel spark and make everything fresh and exciting once again.

7) Return to Somewhere you Love

Having visited over 80 countries, there are many places I love, and cannot wait to revisit.

I have a particular soft spot for Latin America, whilst also being a big fan of Asia. After a few uneventful weeks in Europe, I often find myself bouncing back to one of these two regions, especially to personal favourite spots such as Bali or Argentina.

This is something that reminds you why you fell in love with travel to begin with. You revisit the places that made you happy, and more often than not you will be able to redo the things that gave you joy and motivation in the first place.

As a country counter, I can be guilty of focusing on new destinations. But every so often I’ll end up returning to my favourite spots and remember exactly why I sacrificed the conventional career path for this to begin with.

8) Think About Why you are Travelling

Why are you travelling? If you’re doing it for Instagram likes and to boost your social media presence, then you aren’t doing it for the right reasons. And this most likely means you won’t enjoy it.

You need to think about what your purpose is on the road, and focus on pursuing your passions.

For me, my goal is to visit every country, and my “why” is because I love discovering hidden gems that wouldn’t previously have been on my travel radar.

Nicaragua, Venezuela, Mongolia and Myanmar are amongst my top 10 countries in the world, whereas popular countries like France and Greece feature towards the bottom of my list.

Finding these exciting new countries is what really motivates me towards this goal. And upcoming adventures to the Caucasus and Central Asia keep my optimism up even when my Euro fatigue kicks in and briefly makes me question my enjoyment for travel.

Your “why” may be different to mine. Think about what it is, and focus on that rather than travelling without a clear purpose.

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