Travel is always top of mind in the New Year. Brimming with possibility as 2024 is, it’s easy to drift off into daydreams about the adventures to come. Whether you’ve already planned this year’s big trip a year in advance and have nothing left to do but twiddle your thumbs, or your next vacation is but a twinkle in your eye, travel is always on our minds.
For our editors who travel insatiably, both professionally and for pleasure, we have an array of travel plans ahead. Having spent the last year considering and compiling our list of Best Places to Go in 2024, with some of the world’s best new hotels, national parks. and more, we’ve gone into the year with a bevy of ideas. Read on to find out which trips our editors are most excited to take themselves on this year—from prospective surf trips to Mexico to train rides through the wilds of Malaysia.
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A girls’ trip to the Gili Islands, Indonesia
“For three years, a group of close girlfriends and I have been discussing the need to take a reunion trip somewhere. But logistics are tricky. We are childhood friends, a tight group that grew up together, but now live across Singapore, London, New York, New Zealand, and Melbourne. A few of us are parents. Some have demanding work schedules. All of us have different budgetary and time restraints. Finally, some months ago, we decided we needed to get serious. We cross-referenced our kids school holidays (juggling calendars in different hemispheres), assessed our own budgets, preferences, and more, and MacGyvered the plan to travel to Indonesia’s pristine Gili Islands, thinking they could be a fit for us all. The plan now is to head there in early September. We have started looking at Airbnbs along the beach and discussed the possibility of doing some days on a phinisi boat (if you haven’t been on a phinisi in Gili, have you even been to Gili?). Full disclosure, we are yet to book anything. But this trip, three years in the making, has never felt closer to happening; I don’t think any one of us will let this momentum slip away. —Erin Florio, executive editor
A bike tour of New York’s Catskills and the scenic Hudson Valley
“As a lovely Christmas gift, my mother booked my father, brother, and me on a four-day Backroads biking trip through the Hudson Valley and Catskills starting on Father’s Day. I know this realm of “upstate” fairly well, having spent four uneventful years of undergrad at a liberal arts college in the scenic riverside, and am always keen to return and soak up some more of its beauty. That coupled with a few days with my dad (I see my twin at least once a week, it’s not as special) in nature exercising and eating and doing very little else. I never got to spend the summer in the area, but now I get a week—and we will rest our tired heads at some dreamy hotels: Woodstock Way Hotel in the town of the same name first, and then Troutbeck in Amenia.” —Charlie Hobbs, editorial assistant
A quick jaunt to Montreal
“When I travel, I tend to go for four or five weeks at a time—making my annual pilgrimage to visit my immediate family in Manila (and staying for a while to make the 18-hour flight worth it), then tacking on five days or a week in some far-ish destination on the way home to Brooklyn from the Philippines: Athens, London, even Sydney. So I’m excited to try a quick-ish getaway from New York over a long weekend in 2024. I have my eye on Montreal, where there are some new boutique hotels popping up and I can practice my French without having to take a transatlantic red-eye.” —Matt Ortile, associate editor
