How we pick the top destinations at the travel desk

This is the time of year where newspapers, book publishers and travel agencies start making predictions about where people will be going next year.

A quick flick through my inbox shows that the suggestions are as varied as Long Island, New York (100 years since the Roaring Twenties); Tokyo (the Olympics, obviously); Guernsey (it’s 75 years since the Channel Island was liberated); and Luxembourg, for no reason other than it’s enchanting and relatively under-visited for a European nation.

Last year, The Independent published its own Best in Travel for 2019. How right were we? On the list was Charleston, US; recently linked to London via a twice-weekly British Airways flight. We made the case for Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Plovdiv in Bulgaria, both second cities that deserved more tourists. We also predicted that responsible tourism would go mainstream: and in 2019 this one turned out to be the truest of them all.

There are issues with choosing destinations based on their “hot” factor. Last year, Lonely Planet selected Sri Lanka as the number one country to visit in 2019 – something The Independent’s travel correspondent labelled as “controversial” at the time. Just four months into 2019, the Easter Sunday bombings precipitated a Foreign Office travel ban for the country and tourism is still struggling to recover.

So how do we choose our picks? We’ve always favoured second cities and under-represented destinations around the world – Osaka instead of Tokyo; Leipzig rather than Berlin; Pittsburgh not New York. We consider places where your money can go much further: city breaks in Kiev, Athens and Vilnius rather than Paris, Barcelona or Rome. And we will be thinking about where we can get to by train, rather than choosing to fly. That covers off most of northern Europe, as well as on the new service to connect Amsterdam to Vienna. One travel desk colleague is ambitiously planning to get the train all the way to Rijeka, Croatia’s third-largest city, which has been anointed a 2020 Capital of Culture. Or perhaps 2020’s prediction will be third cities, rather than second cities?

We’ll be publishing our best in travel for 2020 list at the end of November – keep an eye out for it.

Yours,

Cathy Adams

Travel editor