What sets beenseenexplored.com apart from other 'Countries Visited Maps' is that we've added an extra layer by adding destinations. You can read up on the reasons why we did that in the 'How it Works' section.

Of course, this begs the question how we decided which destinations to include. After all, if we were to make a mess of this, it would make the site pretty useless and leave you frustrated. So it's very important to get this as right as possible.

First of all, it's important to get the balance right in terms of how many destinations to include for each country:

• On the one hand, we don't want to make people spend hours on filling out where they've been. It's got to be fun and reasonably quick. So no hundreds of destinations per country.
• But on the other hand, the destinations do need to make up a reasonable representation of a country. Five destinations for, say, Italy wouldn't make much sense and would be able to tell us if someone knows Italy well.

We didn't have a number set in stone beforehand, but ended up with 20-30 destinations for the top countries and 9-10 for a typical country, which seemed reasonable. We also concluded that 5 destinations would have to be the minimum number of destinations for the smaller countries. 

• Naturally, for some countries to even get to 5 destinations would be pretty much impossible, mainly because they're just too small to split up in 5 destinations. Take for example the likes of Singapore, Luxemburg, and Swaziland, or the many smaller Carribean and Pacific islands. In these cases we didn't split up these countries into destinations, but just took them as a whole.

So how did we decide how many and which destinations to pick for each country?

• First of all, we picked the capital and major tourist destinations, for obvious reasons. For most countries it isn't too hard to distinguish the absolute highlights, and the avid traveller can generally name most of them.
• However, in most cases this wouldn't give us a representative selection of destinations. We need a little more than just the absolute highlights so we also aimed to:
  • get a reasonable geogrpahical spread of destinations so that they cover different parts of a country (though not necessarily all parts, just more than - say - a concentrated area with a lot of touristic highlights).
  • get some variation in terms of the type of destinations, so not just cities, ancient ruins, natural highlights, or beach resorts, but a mix of different types (though, again not necessarily each category for each country - some countries will be more city-heavy while others will be more nature or beach-focused).

This second tier of destinations is obviously more subjective and opinions will differ on which destinations to include. That said, we did try to remove our own subjectivity out of it as much as possible, but at the same time realise this is never 100% possible. 

• Bearing in mind the above, we used the following resources to come to a selection of destinations:
  • Travel guides such as the Lonely Planet, Bradt Guides, and Rough Guide (online and offline).
  • The itiniraries of travel agencies - which destinations do they include in holiday tours? Which tours do local travel agencies offer?
  • Travel blogs and trip reviews. Where did travellers go? What are their opinions and recommendations?
  • Online travel forums and discussions about itiniraries. 
  • Local tourism boards (mostly their official website).
  • Other online articles about the highlights of a country, both from established sources (e.g. travel sections of national newspapers) or your typical listicle article of whichever blog (and to be fair, there's often little difference in quality between the two).

We reckon there will generally be consensus about 60-80% of the destinations in a certain country and debate about the remaining 20-40%. We'll explain our reasoning in seperate blog articles for each country.

There is one important last note: we are obviously looking at the world with a certain 'Western bias' of what's a highlight and what not, perhaps driven by what a certain Lonely Planet writer first flags as the highlights, which then become the itiniraries of first backpackers, then tour groups, etc. This is most of all the case when a country is on the brink of becoming a tourist destination, but still not very well known. E.g. the wisdom of what made up the highlights of Colombia ten years ago, is probably different than the perceptions of today, and especially for those countries we have tried to dig a little deeper or may have to revise a little later.

We also try to be aware of destinations that might not be on the main Western tourist trail, but still popular as destinations. Large cities that attract many business travellers, for example, or regions that might not be popular with Westerners, but do attract many tourists from other regions or neighbouring countries (Texas, for example, attracts quite a few Mexican tourists). We're also including mass tourist beach destinations that might get frowned upon by off-the-beaten-track backpackers, but are nonetheless popular with locals or package tourists. That said, these tend to be few and most destinations will be on the typical tourist trail.