Happy New Year 🥳 

One of NomadMania’s core missions is to help people explore the world in a meaningful way and understand it better. For this reason, we approach travel beyond the conventional division into just continents and countries.

We aim to go deeper and further. At the heart of this approach lies our main travel list: the Masterlist of Regions. 

As NomadMania continues to mature, so do our methods!

We have taken on the ambitious task of creating the best world travel list for true explorers — and to achieve this, we need your help.

Region Polls Results

During December of last year, we conducted two in-depth polls regarding possible regional changes and received valuable insights.

Please read this report, based on the results of both the first and second polls. We have organized the findings thematically to help clarify key directions for everyone.

Optimal Scores Adjusted

In response to the valuable feedback from the NomadMania community through polls, comments on this article, and numerous emails from our travellers, we have decided to revisit the analysis and work toward a balanced and reasonable solution.

Upon reviewing the numbers, we observed several interesting patterns. As a result, we reviewed the Optimal Score, making slight adjustments — guided by community feedback and grounded in traditional division practices — while allowing a small margin for sui generis cases.

Read more about the Adjusted Optimal Score here.

This version is now final :-)

Your Guide to Regions Review

You are the experts on your country, and your insights are essential in helping us improve and refine the existing list of regions.

Below is a set of guidelines to help you focus on the right aspects when approaching this important task:

1. Look at the country as a whole and reflect deeply on your knowledge of it.
2. Check the Optimal Score to see how many regions the country should have.
3. Compare the Optimal Score with the current country’s administrative division.
   – In most cases, there are more provinces than NomadMania regions allowed.
4. Consider how existing provinces can be grouped into NomadMania regions.
   – Refer to historical, cultural, geographical and traditional contexts (case study).
5. Ensure that your proposed regions align with the Optimal as closely as possible.
6. Discuss it with other NM members and send us your proposal. 
   – A great way to do this is by setting up a NM meeting (see how). 
   – This week meetings are already planned in Bangkok, Dubai and Dublin.

This step-by-step guide was developed based on several polls conducted within the NomadMania community, along with our best judgment.

See the Regions Review Guide here.

What's Next

You can expect the following from us regarding this project. We plan on approaching the examination of regions in ‘batches’ as follows.

Step 1: Adding the already ‘voted in’ regions based on the polls we have had. This will, for example, include the addition of North-Eastern Syria, Karabakh, a region each in Albania and Dominican Republic etc. 

Step 2: Following your feedback about the ‘small countries’, we then expect to implement any changes in regions in these, along with the implementation of the megacities, also broadly supported by the community.

Step 3: We will at some stage also conduct a final poll to consider your opinions for some of the larger countries where the optimal suggests changes, and also some possible borderline cases, where the optimal is inconclusive.

Step 4: Following the changes already made, the results of Poll 3, asking specific communities for their additional input, and a final assessment of what is necessary, we expect to complete this project by early June... 

... before the NomadMania Conference 6 in Brazil. 

We also expect to correct some errors in the regional borders that have been pointed out by the travel community – for example our divisions of Alberta or Chugoku, and we will open up for more suggestions in order to finalise this.

We expect a final reviewed and renewed regional list by June – a list that may not be perfect, as this is impossible, but will much better reflect the ‘value’ of each country globally. And we expect this list to be stable and remain unchanged unless there are serious geopolitical events which we need to follow.

Thank you very much for your participation :-) 

And as you realise, your continued participation is necessary for us to get this as right as possible. While there is no ‘correct’ way to divide the world, we want to reach a point where past mistakes are amended and we reach the best result both for the traveller and for the country, in terms of a fair, reasonable division based on our criteria.

Are you ready? Then let’s get started with the Regions Review Guide.

Check out our Online Shop. There's definitely something for you :-)

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