Frequently Asked Questions

BonVoyageur helps you organize a trip across several countries. You give it your destinations and your total duration, and the algorithm works out what order to visit them in and how many nights to spend in each, factoring in month-by-month weather, the entry rules tied to your passport, and distances. It is not a guidebook: it doesn't tell you what to do once you're there, it tells you when to be where.

For travelers visiting several countries on a single trip who want to structure their timing without following a pre-made itinerary. One month or three years, in one go or with breaks along the way. Digital nomads, sabbaticals, gap years, round-the-world trips, or simply people who travel a lot by choice. If you're looking for a one-week all-inclusive stay in a single place, this isn't for you.

It books nothing: no flights, no accommodation, no transport, and it sends you to no booking platform. It offers no spots, no must-see lists and no hour-by-hour planning: what happens on the ground is yours. It does not replace the official source on visas. And it writes nothing with generative AI: the computation is deterministic, so the same inputs always produce the same result.

A-Contresens and seasonality maps answer "when should I go to this country" very well. BonVoyageur answers the next question, the one with no obvious answer: in what order do you visit eight countries so each one lands roughly in the right season, without your passport becoming a problem and without crossing the same ocean three times. The two are complementary.

Traveling slowly means taking the time to discover each place in depth rather than rushing from one spot to the next. Two to four weeks per country, slow transport, enough time to understand where you are. Fewer destinations, more experience, and incidentally far fewer flights. The tool is built for that rhythm, but it forces nothing on you: you set the durations.

There is a free tier, usable without even creating an account: up to 5 countries per trip, one saved trip, and three optimized itineraries per day. It is meant to be enough to understand what the tool can do. The paid Voyageur access lifts those limits and unlocks the settings that matter on a long itinerary. Details and prices are on the Pricing page.

One thing: keeping your trip. Without an account it disappears when you close the tab. The account unlocks no advanced feature and changes no limit: it makes your itinerary permanent, brings it back on any device, and lets you import itineraries from the gallery.

Up to 15 countries per trip instead of 5, unlimited saved trips, plenty of room to optimize without rationing your tries, the order computed region by region inside large countries, the search for the best departure window when you have no fixed date, and the Excel export of the itinerary and its budget.

No. It is a one-time payment that opens a period of access, with no automatic renewal and no recurring charge. When the period ends, access stops by itself: there is nothing to cancel. If you buy again while your access is still active, the new period is added to what remains instead of replacing it.

Nothing is ever deleted. A 12-country trip built with Voyageur access stays viewable, and you can always rename or delete it: those are ownership actions. What requires active access again: changing its content (countries, dates, durations, regions, re-optimization) and the Excel export.

By exact dynamic programming (the Held-Karp algorithm). Up to 15 countries, the order it returns is mathematically optimal for the criteria shown: weather quality at the month of arrival, distances, and entry constraints. It is neither an approximation nor generative AI. That is what makes it possible to explain why one order was chosen over another, and why the same trip recomputed tomorrow gives the same answer.

Because a stop's weather depends on the month you arrive, and that month depends on the sum of every duration before it. Adding ten nights in Vietnam shifts everything downstream, and can drop Nepal right into the monsoon. The tool redoes the whole computation instead of merely shifting dates: that is exactly the work a spreadsheet won't do for you.

You can set the time spent in each country, or set none and let the tool distribute your total duration. In that case it starts from the travel style you indicated and from what other travelers actually do in that country, then adjusts. Durations are counted in nights, like a booking, and transit nights are counted separately, before the stop they lead to.

That's the normal way to use it: the computed itinerary is a starting point, not a verdict. Reorder countries by drag and drop, lengthen or shorten a stop, add or remove a country. Everything that depends on it falls back into place immediately: dates, per-stop weather, stay-length alerts. The tool also tells you what your change costs or gains, and you can undo a suggestion you applied.

Yes, and you can pin just one of them. Leave the departure empty and the algorithm picks the best entry point itself. A departure country that is not among your destinations shows up as a transit point at the beginning of the trip. Nothing forces you back to where you started: a loop is never imposed, it comes out of the computation when it fits your anchors.

With Voyageur access, you give a duration and a year, and the tool looks for the window where weather and entry rules line up best across the whole route. On the free tier, enter a departure date: you can try several by hand and compare, within your daily optimization allowance.

Because the north and the south of the same country are not visited in the same season, and treating Chile or India as a single block loses the point. For the 57 countries large enough to change the outcome, you can pick the regions you care about and the order is then computed region by region. It is a Voyageur setting.

204 selectable countries. Monthly weather covers 203 of them (only Western Sahara is missing from the source), including 236 climate regions spread across the 57 largest. Entry rules cover 199 destinations, for every nationality.

From the World Bank's Climate Change Knowledge Portal, CMIP6 models, over the 2020-2039 window. These are monthly normals, not a forecast: they describe what a typical March looks like somewhere, not the weather on March 12th. Choosing a projected window over an observed average is deliberate: the 1991-2020 normals are centered on 2005 and understate the climate you will actually experience.

It is a comfort score from 0 to 10, derived from the raw facts of the month: daytime heat, a penalty above 35°C, the muggy feel computed from temperature and humidity, and rain taken both by volume and by concentration. Two months that receive the same amount of rain are not equivalent if one gets it in ten downpours and the other in thirty showers. That same score feeds the algorithm: what you see is what was optimized.

It is indicative, and that is how it should be read. The matrix is refreshed weekly behind guards that reject an inconsistent import, and a known case can be corrected by hand without waiting. But the source is community-maintained and lags real changes by one to two months: what is guaranteed is regularity, not real time. The dataset's date is shown under the visa panel. Always check with the official source before buying a ticket or filing an application.

Tourist entry conditions: visa exemption, ETA, e-visa, visa on arrival or visa required, the authorized length of stay when it is known, any mandatory online formality even where no visa applies, and the passport validity required on arrival. Where we have verified it by hand, a link to the destination's official portal is shown. Not covered: long-stay, digital nomad, work and student visas.

It compares the time you plan in a country to the length of stay authorized for your passport, and warns you as you approach or exceed that limit. The count is per stay: if you leave the country and come back later, the tool treats it as a new entry. Visa extensions obtained on the spot are not modeled.

No, and that is a deliberate choice. Since the count is per stay, rolling-window cumulative rules, Schengen included, are out of scope and are not computed. If your itinerary passes through the Schengen area more than once, or through any other country applying a cumulative rule, that total is yours to keep.

All of them. You pick your nationality when building your trip, and entry conditions, duration alerts and the visa part of the score are computed for that passport. The old French-passport-only limitation is gone. If you travel with people holding different passports, build the trip on the most constrained one, then check the others.

Through the Excel export, included with Voyageur access: the itinerary stop by stop, the budget, and a departure checklist (passport, insurance, vaccines, bank, eSIM, adapter). There is no PDF export and no calendar export. To show your trip to someone without a file, the share link is enough.

Yes, through a public link: whoever opens it sees the trip without an account, and can clone it to start from your version. You can also publish your trip to the gallery, where other travelers browse it and import it as the starting point for theirs.

Start wide: put in your dream countries, your total duration, and a departure date if you have one. Then look at the proposed order and, above all, at which month each stop lands in, and cut. Six months fit comfortably into six to ten countries if you want to keep a slow-travel pace. Change one duration and watch what moves: it is the best way to feel which countries are season-constrained and which are not.

Audience measurement goes through PostHog, hosted in Europe, with no tracking cookie, on a legitimate interest basis, and you can object at any time from the privacy page or from your account settings. Your trips are yours: you can delete your account and all its data straight from the app, without writing to anyone.

Write to contact@bonvoyageur.fr, we answer within three business days. Reports about entry conditions are the most useful of all: a verified, dated case can be corrected by hand without waiting for the weekly source refresh.