20 Years of ‘Places to Go’
The list made its debut in 2005, when world travel was about half of today’s 1.3 billion arrivals and phones were for making calls. Here’s how The Times’s annual travel list — and travel itself — has changed in the last two decades.
In January 2005, The New York Times published the first version of its “Places to Go” list, with suggestions for dozens of voyages for people itching for new adventures.
The list that publishes next week will mark the 20th anniversary of the list (the index varied in length and name before, in 2014, settling in at “52 Places to Go,” in line with the weeks of the year). Over these last two decades, travel has been dramatically transformed. In 2023, there were 1.3 billion international arrivals worldwide, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. That number in 2005: 806 million.
A traveler consulting our 2005 list had no smartphone, no Instagram, no Google Maps. Most of them saw the list in the printed paper. They may well have been carrying traveler’s checks (or, at the very least, currency). “Overtourism” and “sustainability” were not part of the conversation. Airbnb was not yet a company, let alone a verb.
