The best time to visit somewhere is, above all, a question of weather, and the single most useful tool for answering it is not a forecast but the destination's climate — the pattern of typical conditions it experiences month by month, averaged over many years. A forecast tells you about a specific day a week or two ahead; a climate profile tells you what a place is reliably like in April versus October, which is exactly what you need when planning a trip months in advance. That is what this planner analyses.

For each destination, we look at the average high and low temperature, the typical rainfall, and the number of rainy days in every month of the year, computed from historical reanalysis data. From these we estimate how pleasant each month tends to be for a typical visitor, rewarding comfortable temperatures, neither too hot nor too cold, and penalising the wettest months. The months that combine warm-but-not-scorching days with relatively little rain rise to the top as the recommended times to visit, while the extremes of the hot, cold or wet seasons score lower.

It is worth remembering that the "best" weather is not the only consideration in choosing when to travel, and sometimes not even the most important one. The most pleasant months are often also the busiest and most expensive, as everyone else has the same idea, so the shoulder seasons just before or after the peak can offer a rewarding compromise of decent weather, thinner crowds and lower prices. Some trips are built around specific conditions the comfort score does not capture: snow for a ski holiday, the dry season for a safari, a particular festival, or the wet season that brings a landscape to life. Use the climate analysis as your foundation, then layer your own priorities on top.

A few climate patterns are worth understanding as you plan. Tropical destinations near the equator tend to be warm year-round but divide the year into wet and dry seasons rather than hot and cold ones, so the dry season is usually the target. Places with a Mediterranean climate offer warm, dry summers and mild, wetter winters, with spring and autumn often the sweet spot. Destinations in the southern hemisphere have their seasons reversed relative to the north, so their summer falls in December and January. And the higher the altitude, the cooler a place will be than its latitude alone suggests. The month-by-month breakdown for your chosen destination will make its particular rhythm clear.