Now that summer 2023 is cleared for landing, it’s time to look back on the record-hot travel season. (No, literally.)
The influence of highbrow, handcrafted hospitality could be seen everywhere: in new boutique stays in the Balearics (check out PRIOR’s guide to the Spanish archipelago here); in a restored Saint Laurent villa in Tangier; in the ongoing Art Deco arms race between hotels everywhere from Mumbai to Mexico City to Manhattan.
After the pandemic, domestic tourism stateside took off. On social media, the endless stream of Americans summering everywhere but America told a different story, however. (Let us never forget the tourist from Denver who cluelessly complained on TikTok that trekking around the idyllic Amalfi Coast was akin to 'literal manual labor.”)
Fewer crowds meant there was newfound space to rethink warm-weather pastimes, coast to coast — from coniferous drives through rare Monterey cypress groves on the Central Coast of California to the discovery that New York’s Hudson River Valley is now home to some of the best jerk chicken in the country.
On the other hand, many of Europe's obvious summer playgrounds were packed like a can of Cento sardines. Luckily, tourist-flow excesses are great reminders to explore those regions not yet on Unesco’s List of World Heritage in Danger.
So, join us on our upcoming trip to Italy's Piedmont, the region of Barolo and Barbaresco. Journey to secret Salento, the southernmost tip of Italy's bootheel. Set sail to the wild and windswept Sicilian isle of Pantelleria.
If nothing else, otherworldly times call for otherworldly itineraries.
A popular summer attraction in Taipei, the Taiwanese capital, was a tour of Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park, a former military detention center that is now an unexpected tourist hotspot after Nancy Pelosi visited the site last year. And with its pop-up camp on Brazil's desolate north Atlantic coast, the “wandering” hotel concept 700’000 Heures even managed to put Lençóis Maranhenses, a series lagoons and white sandscapes resembling the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, on the vacation map.
