What Kind of Traveller Are You?

About this test

We talk about travel as if it were one activity, when two people in the same city in the same week are doing something completely different. One ticks eleven sites and comes home exhausted; the other spent four hours at the same café table and comes home rested. Neither did it wrong: they weren't after the same thing. So the useful question isn't where you're going but what you came for.

This test separates seven ways of travelling: the explorer, who leaves for the unplanned; the planner, whose trip begins six weeks early; the slow traveller, who came to decelerate; the collector, who came to see and to prove; the night owl, who reads a place after midnight; the eater, who reads it through its kitchens; and the happy homebody, who came simply to rest and owes nobody an explanation.

Knowing your profile does two very concrete things: it stops you measuring yourself against someone else's idea of a proper holiday, and it saves you from travelling with an incompatible type — planners and explorers rarely have a good fortnight together. Sixteen questions about your suitcase, your rainy days and what you say when you get back are enough to settle it.

How it works

Every answer credits one of the seven types. Your profile is the one that dominates across all sixteen questions, with things going wrong — a cancelled flight, a day of rain, an overcrowded site — weighing as much as stated preferences.