How We Picked the 2020 ‘Places to Go’ List

There are so many places in the world, and only 52 spots. How do we choose? (Do you know all the synonyms for “argue”? ) 52 Places to Go in 2020 is here.

Read the full list now. “Where would you go if you could go anywhere? ” That was the question I posed to the members of The Times Travel desk back at the beginning of September, at our kickoff lunch for the 2020 edition of our annual 52 Places to Go list. Between that day and the list’s publication, there have been almost four months of research, discussion, debate and as many synonyms for “argument” as you can imagine.

In the end, we came down to these 52 destinations that we hope will inspire, delight and motivate you to explore the world. How did we choose them? After that initial poll, we asked our regular contributors, as well as The Times’s foreign and domestic correspondents, to suggest places that seemed newly fresh and compelling. We pestered in-the-know travelers for their 2020 musts.

We grilled travel pros about what had them excited. To make the cut, it is not enough for a place to be beautiful, amazing and culturally significant. It also has to answer the question, why now? Why this place, this year?

Tokyo, a great city in any year, is hosting the Summer Olympics in 2020. It’s on our list. The Bahamas, always a pleasure, needs support from tourists in the wake of 2019’s Hurricane Dorian. On the list.

Greenland, with its magnificent glaciers threatened by global warming and new airports on the horizon, made it, too. As we made our choices, themes emerged. This year the two most prominent were the importance of sustainability and the pull of history. Over the last year, the travel world woke up to the implications of climate change and its contributions to global warming, as well as questions about overtourism and who benefits from tourist dollars.

A growing number of companies, destinations and individual travelers are committed to mitigating their impact on earth. Global brands like Hilton and Marriott pledged to get rid of single-use plastics; KLM, the Dutch airline, ran ads suggesting that travelers might want to take the train. On Times Travel, we committed to buying carbon offsets for our staff plane travel.