Last-minute departure · Sep 2026
End of the Earth
Peru · Bolivia · Chile · Argentina
2026 edition. Costs and rules last verified: July 2026.
You’ve made the decision, or you’re close to making it. Three months away. Not a holiday with a return flight looming before you’ve unpacked properly, but a proper stretch of time somewhere else. Long enough to live differently. Long enough to matter.
What you need now is not more inspiration. What you need is a plan. This guide covers how to travel for 3 months from first decision to final homecoming: the timeline, the money, the house, the packing, the paperwork, the health preparation, and the parts nobody warns you about: the emotional adjustment, the family conversations, the strange experience of coming home. It draws on everything DECADES has learned designing three-month experiences for people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, and it links to detailed guides on every step, so you can go as deep as you need on the parts that matter most to you.
If you’re still weighing up whether an extended trip is right for you at all, start with our guide to the gap year for retirees: the case for going, the stories of people who have, and the answers to the doubts. This page assumes you’ve decided. Now we work out how.
Before the logistics, a brief word on why this length of trip deserves its own guide.
Two weeks is a holiday. You consume a place (the sights, the restaurants, the beach) and you come home rested but fundamentally unchanged. Six or twelve months is a relocation in all but name, with the visa complexity, tax questions, and upheaval that implies.
Three months sits in a sweet spot. It’s long enough for the transformation that extended travel promises: you develop routines, you’re greeted by name at the local café, you stop photographing everything because you live there now. And it’s short enough to be practical. Your house can be managed. Your prescriptions can be organised in a single supply. For most destinations outside Europe, a UK passport holder needs no visa at all, and within the Schengen area, 90 days is precisely what you’re allowed. The financial commitment is significant but bounded. The family can cope. The garden mostly survives.
Three months is the longest trip you can take without dismantling your life, and the shortest one that changes it. And the appetite is real: AARP’s 2025 Travel Trends Report found 70% of Americans over 50 planned to travel that year, with a growing share choosing longer, slower trips, while UK bookings from travellers aged 60-plus were up 42% on pre-pandemic levels according to Intrepid Travel.
Before any booking, decide the shape of your trip, because everything from budget to packing flows from this choice. Long-term travel planning at this length comes down to three models.
The single base. One apartment, one town, ninety days. You rent a place in Chiang Mai or Kyoto or Chania, and you live there; day trips and the odd overnight excursion, but one set of keys throughout. This is the cheapest model (monthly rental rates run 30–50% below weekly ones), the simplest logistically, and the deepest culturally: it’s the model where you’re most likely to end the trip with local friends and a standing table at a restaurant. Its risk is choosing wrong (committing three months to a place that turns out not to suit you), which is why single-basers should visit first, or choose somewhere with an established long-stay community.
The two-or-three-base trip. A month in each of two or three places; say, a month in Thailand, a month in Cambodia, a final month in Vietnam. This is the most popular model among DECADES travellers and the one we’d suggest as a default: you keep most of the depth and economy of settling in, while building in variety and an escape hatch. If base one disappoints, base two is already booked. The cost premium over a single base is modest: mainly the transfer days and the loss of one month’s long-stay discount.
The moving route. A new place every four to ten days, strung along a route; the classic itinerary trip, stretched to twelve weeks. Be cautious with this one. It looks the most exciting on paper and is by some distance the most tiring in practice: every move costs a day of packing, transit, and reorientation, and at twenty-plus moves across three months, the trip becomes about logistics rather than living. If a route is what draws you (Japan’s golden triangle and beyond, or an arc through Southeast Asia) build it from week-long stays at minimum, and put a two-week “rest base” in the middle. Our itinerary ideas for retirees show how to pace a moving route so it energises rather than exhausts.
There’s no wrong answer, but there is a wrong match. The traveller who loved a fortnight’s touring holiday may assume they want the moving route, when what made that fortnight work (the energy, the novelty compressed into limited time) doesn’t scale to ninety days. When in doubt, fewer bases, longer stays.
The single most common mistake in long-term travel planning is starting too late, not because the tasks are difficult, but because a handful of them have long lead times, and discovering that at month two is stressful in a way it needn’t be.
The full countdown is laid out in our detailed 12-month planning timeline for a 3-month trip, but the shape of it is this:
Twelve to nine months out: decide the big things. Where, when, roughly how much, and whether you’ll build the trip yourself or join an organised programme. Destination and season drive everything downstream; budget, wardrobe, visas, insurance. This is also the moment for the two most important conversations: the honest one with yourself about what you actually want from the trip (rest, stimulation, difference, company) and the one with your family about what you’re planning and why.
Nine to six months out: put the skeleton in place. Book flights if you’re travelling in high season. Sort accommodation for at least your first month. Begin the visa research if your plans need one. Speak to your GP about a three-month medication supply; this takes longer than almost anyone expects.
Six to three months out: handle the house and the money. Decide what happens to your home. Open a fee-free travel account. Arrange insurance properly, reading the exclusions. Start the admin of pausing a life: subscriptions, deliveries, standing arrangements.
The final three months: details and dress rehearsals. Packing lists, power of attorney conversations if relevant, a full test of your banking and phone setup, and (more useful than it sounds) a practice fortnight of living out of the suitcase you intend to take.
None of this is difficult. All of it is easier with time. If you take one thing from this section: start the medication and visa conversations early, because they’re the two you cannot compress.
Money is the question underneath every other question, so let’s put real numbers on the table.
For UK travellers, a self-organised three-month trip typically lands in these ranges, excluding long-haul flights:
The Greek Islands and Mediterranean Europe: £6,000–£11,000 for one person, with an apartment entirely to yourself. The biggest variable is accommodation standard, a comfortable one-bedroom apartment on a smaller island runs £900–£1,500 a month; the equivalent somewhere better connected, like Corfu or Rhodes, closer to £1,800–£2,500.
Southeast Asia (Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia): £4,500–£8,000 per person including regional flights. Day-to-day living costs are roughly half of Western Europe’s, though comfort at this life stage (air conditioning, central locations, the occasional splurge) narrows the gap more than backpacker blogs suggest.
Japan: £9,000–£14,000 per person. The most expensive of the popular choices and, ask anyone who’s done it, among the most worth it.
On top of these: travel insurance for a three-month trip at 60-plus typically costs £300–£800 depending on medical history, and long-haul return flights £600–£1,400 per person.
The full line-item breakdowns (with sample monthly budgets at three spending levels) are in our complete cost breakdown for 3 months of travel, and the wider financial picture, including pension drawdown timing and what the trip means for your longer-term plans, is covered in our retirement travel budget guide.
Two financial points worth making early. First, the offsets are real: a rented-out house, a paused commuting-and-coffee life, and a UK cost of living temporarily switched off can recover a surprising fraction of the trip’s cost. Second, the comparison that matters isn’t three months abroad versus three months at home costing nothing; it’s three months abroad versus what you’d otherwise spend the money on, and when you’d otherwise feel this alive spending it.
Once you’re travelling, the financial task changes from budgeting to plumbing: making sure money flows to you cheaply and reliably for twelve weeks.
The essentials: at least two fee-free debit or credit cards from different providers (so a lost or frozen card is an inconvenience, not a crisis); a specialist travel account for spending abroad; direct debits reviewed and either maintained, paused, or cancelled before departure; and your bank told (explicitly, in writing through the app) that you’ll be abroad and where. Pension payments continue exactly as normal wherever you are, which surprises more people than it should.
The complete setup, including how to handle a frozen card from a beach in Hoi An and why you should never let a foreign card machine charge you in pounds, is in our guide to managing your finances while travelling for 3 months.
For most people the house is the second-largest practical question after money, and the answer shapes the budget significantly.
You have four real options. Leave it empty, with a family member or neighbour keeping an eye: the simplest option, but check your home insurance, because most UK policies restrict or void cover after 30 or 60 consecutive days unoccupied. A house-sitter, paid or through a matching platform, solves the insurance and security question and keeps pets in their own home. Rent it out, for the full period on a short-term let basis; the option that can fund a large slice of the trip, at the cost of preparation, management, and the emotional oddness of strangers in your home. A home exchange; the least known and, for the right person, the best value of all: your house for theirs, often with cars included.
The full comparison (costs, insurance implications, tax notes on rental income, and how to decide) is in what to do with your house when travelling long-term, and the broader checklist of pausing everything else (post, subscriptions, car, garden, cleaner, milk deliveries, the lot) is in how to pause your life for 3 months.
The pleasant surprise: for a three-month trip, most UK passport holders need very little paperwork.
Japan grants 90 days visa-free. Thailand now offers 60 days visa-free with a straightforward 30-day extension. Vietnam’s e-visa covers 90 days. Most of Latin America allows 90 days or more on arrival.
The one big exception is the obvious one: Europe. Since Brexit, UK citizens can spend only 90 days in any 180-day period across the entire Schengen area, and that’s the whole area combined, not per country. For a three-month European trip this is workable but tight, and it demands attention: 90 days means 90 days, overstays are taken seriously, and the ETIAS authorisation now required for entry needs sorting before you fly. If you want longer in one country, France, Portugal, Spain and Italy all offer long-stay visa routes that retirees can realistically use; with lead times of two to four months.
Everything you need, country by country, is in our guide to visas for long-term travel from the UK.
Nothing undermines a long trip like an avoidable health problem, and almost every health problem on a three-month trip is avoidable with preparation.
The core of it: see your GP eight to twelve weeks before departure, not for permission, but for a partnership. You’ll need any prescriptions converted to a three-month supply (NHS practices handle this differently; some require a private prescription for the third month, so ask early). Check what vaccinations your destination suggests and whether your boosters are current. If you manage a condition (blood pressure, diabetes, a heart rhythm, a joint waiting for its moment) talk through what monitoring looks like abroad and what would constitute a “come home” signal.
Then there’s the insurance, which for this trip is not a checkout add-on but a researched purchase. Trip-length limits are the first trap; many annual policies cover only 31 days per trip. Medical declarations are the second: an undeclared condition, however minor it seems, can void the entire policy. What to buy, what to avoid, and what a good policy costs at 60-plus is covered in our long-term travel insurance guide, and the day-to-day health practices (medication routines across time zones, staying fit on the road, finding a doctor abroad) in staying healthy on a 3-month trip.
The great counterintuitive truth of long-term packing: the longer the trip, the less you take. A three-week holiday can absorb overpacking. A three-month trip punishes it, because you carry every unnecessary kilogram through every airport, staircase, and cobbled street of the next ninety days.
The working principle is to pack for ten days and wash weekly, which is what you do at home, after all. One case you can lift over your head, one day bag, a considered medication and documents kit, and the discipline to leave the “just in case” pile on the bed. Anything you turn out to need, you can buy there; almost nothing you leave behind will be missed.
The complete list; clothing by climate, the electronics that earn their place, the documents folder, and the five things experienced long-term travellers always take; is in packing for 3 months: the complete packing list.
The fear, particularly with grandchildren in the picture, is of absence; of missing a birthday, a school play, a first step. The reality of modern long-stay travel is closer to the opposite: many DECADES travellers report speaking with their families more from Kyoto or Lisbon than they did from twenty minutes down the road, because contact becomes intentional rather than assumed.
The technical side is now trivially easy and cheap, an eSIM with a regional data package costs £20–£40 a month, and every apartment has WiFi. The meaningful side takes a little design: a standing weekly video call that survives time zones, a shared photo album the grandchildren actually look at, postcards (still unbeatable), and honest agreements about what “checking in” means so that a quiet day doesn’t become a family incident.
The full playbook is in how to stay connected with family during long-term travel.
This is the section most guides omit, and it’s the one our travellers most often say they wish they’d read first.
Three months away has an emotional shape. The first fortnight is the honeymoon; everything is novel, you can’t believe you did this, the light is better here. Somewhere in weeks three to five, most people hit a wobble: the novelty thins, a routine hasn’t formed yet, home feels far away, and a quiet voice asks whether this was a mistake. It isn’t. It’s the predictable turbulence of an identity adjusting; the same dip that new retirees, new parents, and new expatriates all describe. It passes, almost always within a week or two, and what follows is the reason people take these trips: the settled, unhurried middle stretch where you’re no longer travelling somewhere but living there.
Knowing the arc in advance is half the protection. The other half: routines, purpose, the difference between chosen solitude and creeping loneliness, and how to design company into life on the road; is covered in adjusting to life on the road.
And then there’s the return, which has its own arc. Home is exactly as you left it; you are not. The first fortnight back can feel flat in a way that catches people off guard, and handled well, that flatness becomes fuel: for the next trip, for the changes the trip revealed you wanted, for the version of retirement you actually want to live. What to expect and how to land well is in returning home after 3 months away.
This guide is destination-agnostic on purpose; the how of three-month travel is much the same wherever you point it. But the where shapes the character of the trip, so here is the short version of the thinking.
For a first extended trip: the Greek Islands. The infrastructure, the climate, the flight time home if needed, the English widely spoken, and the slow ferry-and-village rhythm all make it one of the gentlest possible introductions to living abroad. Our Greek Islands programme is often the first trip for exactly this reason.
For depth and difference: Japan. Three months is the perfect length: enough to get past the surface strangeness into the profound comfort and courtesy of the place, and to see a full season turn.
For value: Southeast Asia, where the same budget buys half as long again, and where the warmth (climatic and human) suits the British winter escape perfectly.
For range in a single trip: Australia and New Zealand, reef to alpine peaks to wine valley to rainforest, slow-looped rather than rushed, for travellers who want breadth as much as depth.
Eight fully sketched routes, each with a month-by-month rhythm and realistic costs, are in 3-month travel itinerary ideas: 8 routes for retirees, and our complete destination guides live in the best destinations for retirement travel hub.
Everything above assumes you might do this yourself, and you can. Thousands of people organise brilliant three-month trips independently every year, and for a certain kind of traveller the organising is half the pleasure.
But it’s worth being honest about what DIY costs: roughly 60–100 hours of planning and admin before departure, ongoing management throughout (bookings, changes, problems), the single-handed carrying of every risk above, and (the one people underestimate most) the absence of built-in company: ninety days is a long time to be your own only dinner companion. The research is one thing; being your own tour operator for ninety days is another.
The alternative is a curated experience: accommodation, itinerary spine, local support, health and insurance guidance, and a small group of like-minded travellers, all handled, which is exactly the kind of structured 3-month experience DECADES designs, with the depth of independent travel and none of the administrative load. It costs more than DIY on paper; whether it costs more in practice, once your time, risk, and the quality of what’s arranged are priced in, is an open question.
The full, even-handed comparison (including the honest cases where DIY is clearly the right answer) is in DIY long-term travel vs organised experiences.
Everything in this guide goes deeper in the articles below, written for people who've got past the 'is this possible?' stage and are working out the specifics.
Can I afford to travel for 3 months? More people can than think they can. A comfortable three months in the Greek Islands or Mediterranean Europe costs £6,000–£11,000 per person; comparable to what many people spend on two or three conventional holidays plus the ordinary cost of being at home. Rent your house out and the net cost can fall dramatically. The honest arithmetic is in our cost breakdown.
Is three months too long to be away from family? It’s the length of a school term, and it passes just as quickly. With a weekly video call and a shared photo stream, most travellers find relationships are undamaged or improved, and a family visit in the middle of the trip, with you as the local guide, is often the highlight of everyone’s year.
What if something goes wrong with my health abroad? This is what preparation is for: a proper GP review before departure, a full medication supply, insurance that actually covers you, and a destination chosen with healthcare quality in mind. Japan, Thailand and Australia’s private systems all deliver excellent care. The full preparation is in our health guide.
Do I need a visa to travel for 3 months? Often not. Japan, Vietnam and most of Latin America allow 90 days on a UK passport; Thailand gets there with one simple extension. Europe’s Schengen area allows exactly 90 days in 180; enough, but count carefully. Details in the visa guide.
Should I go in one country or several? For a first trip: one or two bases, one or two countries. Depth beats breadth at this trip length, and the savings on monthly accommodation rates are substantial. See the three trip shapes above.
What’s the best age to do this? The best age is the age you are when you have the time, the health, and the desire simultaneously. Our travellers range from mid-fifties to early eighties. The only consistent regret we hear is from people who waited for a “right moment” that a health event eventually withdrew. If the window is open, use it.
Will I be lonely travelling alone for three months? Less than you fear, if you design for it; company on the road is not luck but structure. A language class, a standing table at the same café, a walking group, the other long-stayers who reliably appear wherever people settle for a season: these turn a solo trip into a peopled one, on your terms. Some evenings will be quiet, and many travellers come to treasure them. A curated small-group experience is the strongest version of the design; built-in company from like-minded people, with independence whenever you want it, which is exactly what DECADES trips are built around. Our solo travel after 60 guide covers it in depth.
Three months is not a fantasy trip. It is a project (a thoroughly achievable one) and like any project it yields to a list, a timeline, and a start date.
So here is the entire guide in one paragraph: decide where and when, twelve months out if you can. Put real numbers on it. Start the two slow clocks early; medication and visas. Decide what the house does. Insure properly, pack lightly, set up the money plumbing, design the family connection, and expect the wobble in week four; it passes. Come home changed, and let that be the point.
Get the free 12-Month Countdown Planner. Every step in this guide as a printable timeline and checklist; the same planning framework DECADES uses to design its own trips. Download the planner.
And if you’d rather someone who has done this dozens of times handled the machinery while you simply live it: that’s what we’re for. Book a discovery call and talk it through with a human who has answered every one of these questions before.
