The person behind MyTripNext
Software engineer, aviation enthusiast, and the person who built MyTripNext from scratch, because I couldn't find a travel tool that actually did what I needed.
The origin
My wife has a very specific taste in travel. She doesn't want to go where everyone else is going. She wants places that feel undiscovered , the kind of destination where you're not surrounded by tourists competing for the same photos, where the locals haven't been conditioned to treat visitors as walking wallets.
Every time we tried to use existing travel sites to find places like that, we hit the same wall. Results were shaped by which hotels had affiliate deals, which destinations were trending on social media, which routes airlines were promoting. The "hidden gems" lists were anything but. You could feel the commercial pressure behind every recommendation.
I wanted a tool that would answer one question honestly: given what we care about , climate, landscape, activities, budget , where in the world actually fits?
So I built it myself. No algorithm that surfaces popular destinations because they're popular. No promoted results. No incentive to push you anywhere specific. Just a match between what you're looking for and what 24,000+ cities actually are.
Travel philosophy
After 30+ countries, a pattern became impossible to ignore: the best experiences almost always happened in the least visited places. Not because obscurity is romantic, but because of what it means for the people who live there.
In heavily touristed places, the relationship between locals and visitors has been shaped by years of high volume. It can feel transactional, sometimes adversarial. But in places that don't see many outsiders, something different happens. The interaction feels natural on both sides. People are curious rather than habituated. You're a person, not a category.
The best people I've met in travel were in places where they hadn't yet learned to be tired of tourists.
That's what my wife is chasing when she asks for somewhere nobody went , not a bragging right, but that quality of encounter. It's what I had in mind when building the filtering and ranking behind this site.
How it was made
MyTripNext is a solo project. No team, no investors, no sponsored results , ever. I built the backend in Java Spring Boot and the frontend in vanilla JS and HTML. The tech choices were deliberate: stability over trendiness, something I can reason about alone.
Five of the six months it took to build were spent on data. Climate averages, terrain classification, activity tagging, budget estimates, geographic metadata , all sourced from open, public datasets and structured into a database that makes the matching possible. That database is what makes the search results meaningful rather than cosmetic.
This is an ongoing project. The data grows, the matching logic improves, and features get added when they're actually useful. I'm not building toward an exit , I'm building something I want to keep using.
Set your preferences and find where actually fits.