The travel brochure of the future, it seems, is being drafted not by poets or dreamers, but by a committee of algorithms and collective anxiety. The latest dispatch informs us, with the bland certainty of a meteorologist predicting rain, that the human herd is to be gently corralled towards Madeira, Tbilisi, and Chicago in the year
- One notes the peculiar geometry of this new pilgrimage: a volcanic Atlantic rock, a Silk Road capital crouched in a valley, and a grid-ironed metropolis on a great lake. The global tourism ‘rebound’—a word so violently optimistic it suggests a rubber ball flung from a child’s fist—has apparently calculated its trajectory with clinical precision. We are not merely going on holiday; we are participating in a grand, post-traumatic realignment of desire.
The appeal, we are told, lies in ‘unique attractions and cultural offerings’. A phrase so sterile it could be the motto of a particularly efficient museum. One imagines the soul of the traveller, that restless, bruised thing, being presented with a menu: *Unique Attraction A
- with a side of Cultural Offering B. In Madeira, this translates to levadas cutting through emerald mountains like the careful stitches of a master tailor, and the poignant, sugar-dusted ghost of the British ex-pat, forever taking tea on a sun-bleached balcony. It is Europe’s final outpost before the Atlantic void, a place for contemplating frontiers, both geographical and personal. The irony, of course, is that its trending status ensures the frontier will soon be populated with Instagrammers, all seeking the same solitary epiphany.
Then, Tbilisi. A city that has spent centuries being a pawn in other empires’ games, now rebranded as a ‘must-visit spot’. Its allure is a potent cocktail of ancient stone, Soviet brutalist concrete, and the hazy, philosophical warmth of a kvevri-fermented amber wine. Here, East and West don’t so much meet as slump together in a worn, comfortable armchair, too tired for conflict. The traveller comes not for pristine perfection, but for the elegant, melancholic beauty of patina—the sense of a history so densely layered it becomes a form of weather. One visits Tbilisi not to escape the past, but to sit quietly with it, listening to its polyphonic murmurs drift from a basement wine bar.
And Chicago, that brawny, broad-shouldered rebuttal to coastal American elitism. Its resurgence is the most intellectually satisfying of the trio. While the world’s gaze was fixed on New York’s neurosis or LA’s sunbleached fiction, Chicago was quietly perfecting the art of civic grandeur. Its ‘cultural offering’ is not a singular artefact, but an atmosphere—the blue chill of a jazz note in a near-dark club, the visceral, meaty scent of ambition (and, quite literally, of steak), the breathtaking arrogance of a skyline that dares you to find a more perfect composition. It is a city built on pragmatism and poetry, on stockyard fortunes and Frank Lloyd Wright’s furious horizontals. To trend now is to be discovered by a world finally ready for its unapologetic substance.
This global triage of destinations is a fascinating symptom of our age. Consider the parallel: as Venice installs turnstiles and Barcelona protests the ‘tourist plague’, the algorithm, in its infinite wisdom, simply redirects the flow. It is a hydraulic solution to a spiritual problem. We saw it with the ‘revenge travel’ of 2023, a spectacle of human beings queuing with a kind of grim determination to board aircraft, as if the act itself could erase the memory of locked doors and empty skies. The destinations of 2026 feel like a calmer, more calculated phase of this: not revenge, but strategic retreat into the ostensibly authentic.
Yet, beneath the sparkling wit of these predictions lies a vein of melancholic clarity. What does it mean when a place ‘trends’? It is the commodification of wonder, the scheduling of serendipity. The traveller becomes a data point, their ‘new experience’ pre-ordained by a thousand blog posts identical to this one. We are all both part of and profoundly outside this machine—eagerly consuming the list while simultaneously mourning the loss of the undiscovered.
The true journey for 2026, then, may not be to the floating gardens of Funchal, the sulphur baths of Abanotubani, or the roaring galleries of the Art Institute. It might be an interior one: the effort to see these places not as items on a trending checklist, but as living, breathing, contradictory entities that will persist long after the algorithmic gaze has swivelled elsewhere. They were ‘must-visit’ long before a report declared them so, and will remain so long after the trend evaporates like mist on a Madeiran morning. The challenge is to arrive there not as a fulfilment of a prophecy, but as a quiet, conscious act of rebellion against the very predictability of our own desires. Book your flight, by all means. But perhaps leave the itinerary to chance.
