Nothing makes us more excited to get up and go than putting together our annual Hot List, now in its 27th year. This curated collection of the world’s best new hotels, cruises, restaurants, cultural destinations, and transportation projects is a labor of love for our global team, which spends the year researching, visiting, and vetting the entries to bring you a definitive directory of new standards for hospitality. Think a new state-of-the-art cruise terminal welcoming over 10,000 passengers per day, and the new air and train routes exciting Americans from coast to coast. These are the best new ways to travel this year.
Click here to see the entire Hot List for 2023.
Doha's new Grand Cruise Terminal
Qatar’s art-filled Hamad International Airport is regularly voted among the world’s best by air travelers, and now passengers arriving by sea will be greeted in similar style at the just-launched Doha Grand Cruise Terminal. Opened just before the FIFA World Cup, the new facility sprawls along the water’s edge near the city center. It is able to host two mega-ships simultaneously, with a capacity to welcome 12,000 passengers per day. In a nod to traditional Arabian architecture, the building’s sand-colored façade features rows of repeated arches, creating dramatic contrasts of light and shadow. There’s an art gallery, a large open-air rooftop terrace, and, perhaps most thrillingly, an escalator for arriving passengers that passes through a vast aquarium before emerging into the bright Doha sunshine.
New and revamped airlines and airports, from Doha to Honolulu
Ask and you shall receive. Pent-up demand for flights to Australia and New Zealand (two of the last countries to lift COVID-related travel restrictions) has sparked a handful of new direct airline routes, including Air New Zealand’s game-changing nonstop from JFK to Auckland (lie-flat beds in economy!), as well as San Francisco to Brisbane on United and Dallas to Melbourne aboard Australia’s own, Qantas. New direct flights are also making previously tricky-to-reach places much more accessible. Take the first nonstop US-to-Cook Islands flight on Hawaiian Airlines. Travelers no longer need to fly from the States to New Zealand and then backtrack to the Cook Islands, but instead can get there directly from Honolulu, saving hours. The new Washington Dulles-to-Amman flight on United ups the options for getting to Jordan, and the Azores, Portugal’s increasingly popular island chain, is now reachable from JFK on Azores Airlines and from Newark on United.
Increasingly, airport terminals are feeling more like high-end malls with luxury boutiques, million-dollar art installations, and outposts of celebrity-chef restaurants than utilitarian passageways to departure gates. These creature comforts are becoming the new norm for New Yorkers, with two of the area’s major hubs competing for the most bells and whistles: LaGuardia’s Terminal C and Newark’s Terminal A have been completely reimagined. LaGuardia’s C, a Delta hub, is now home to the brand’s largest sky club, while Newark’s A is doubling down on Jersey pride, commissioning the state’s arts community for installations as well as bringing in a number of locally loved restaurants and shops (including a Jersey Mike’s Subs stop).