The 24 Best Places to Go in 2024 (2024)

Accra has steadily been cementing its reputation as the continent’s capital of cool, and a reimagination of pan-African heritage has ignited the city’s foodies. Leading the way is the Ghana Food Movement, a network of food change makers intent on surfacing the sexy in sustainable food. With the May 2024 opening of its Link-up Kitchen in the buzzing Osu neighborhood, this meeting place–cum–test kitchen will house the Movement’s popular Dine and Dance series, where young chefs highlight local ingredients in multicourse dinners before getting down to beats by local DJs. The hub will also host pop-ups featuring up-and-coming chefs and Indigenous menus, such as those offered by Abena Offeh-Gyimah, whose food tours spotlight heirloom ingredients and a “reconnection to ancestral ways of eating.” This year also sees chef Selassie Atadika of Midunu resuming her Nomadic Dinners celebrating African ingredients, as well as quarterly chocolate tastings of her gorgeous bonbons inspired by flavors like beriberi chili and Cape Malay spice. After dinner, you’ll find the balmy West African capital’s electric club scene spoils you for choice. While the Grammys have just come to the party (the awards will feature a Best African Music Performance category for the first time, in 2024), locals have been lighting it up at festivals like Chale Wote Street Art Festival (August) and AfroFuture (previously Afrochella; December) for years. Should you find time to sleep, the December 2023 opening of the 145-room Hilton Accra Cantonments marks the brand’s debut in Ghana.

All eyes may be on Tahiti this year as Teahupo’o, a village on the south coast and home to one of “the deadliest waves in the world,” gears up to host the 2024 Paris Olympics surf competition. Spectators can watch the event on giant screens at celebration sites across the island, such as Jardin de Paofai, Papara Beach Break, and Marina of Punui. The rest of French Polynesia, a sublime blue territory of 118 islands, is continuing its dedication to sustainability over mass tourism. Keen to bill itself as a regenerative destination, Coral Gardeners, an ocean conservation group, is in the process of planting one million heat-resilient corals worldwide by 2025. It’s also working on upcycling abandoned pearl farms for coral restoration on Ahe, an atoll northeast of Tahiti. Hotels across the jumble of islands are also getting spruced up, with a flurry of rejuvenations, starting in Bora Bora. In January 2024, the Four Seasons Resort Bora Bora will launch a botanical tour highlighting its carefully preserved native flora and fauna, followed by the reopening of Le Meridien as Westin Bora Bora in mid-2024.

When National Geographic and Lindblad Expeditions launch their new Belize to Tikal itinerary in January 2024, travelers may be tempted to tack on a few days ashore Belize’s white sand beaches and palm-dotted islands. But Guatemala, home to the jungle-shrouded Mayan ruins of Tikal, is the extension not to skip. The country’s mix of rich Indigenous and colonial history, staggering natural beauty, and now expanding infrastructure for tourism in the form of restaurants, hotels, and tours makes 2024 the year to explore Guatemala in earnest. In the charming city of Antigua, the world class MUNAG (National Museum of Art Guatemala), which covers 3,000 years of heritage through a contemporary lens, is now open, and a second-phase unveiling is expected imminently. Nearby, the team behind Luna Zorro studio—known for merging traditional craftsmanship with modern textile design and crafting boutique trips throughout Guatemala in collaboration with El Camino Travel—is renovating a historic property into La Valiente: It will house a Luna Zorro boutique and a coffee-and-wine bar in the front, with a two-bedroom casita for rent in the back, all set to open in October 2024. Café No Sé, meanwhile, an anchor of the old city that’s touted as the first mezcal bar outside of Mexico, will continue to honor “20-ish” years of being in business with events and live music. A flush of new art spaces, like Aura Galerías, and innovative restaurants continue to characterize the capital of Guatemala City.

An otherworldly land of undiscovered species and bizarre biological riches, the rugged, remote Indian Ocean isle of Madagascar has always promised to upend visitors’ senses and logistical prowess. Happily, the latter is changing as the pioneers responsible for some of the continent’s finest conservation tourism offerings are upping the ante on the world’s fourth largest island. Located inside the essentially unvisited Namoroka National Park, Namoroka Tsingy Exploration Camp’s mid-2024 opening makes seven luxury safari tents your portal to a landscape of baobabs jutting from the formations of limestone knives known as tsingy and populated by lemurs that haven’t learned to fear people.

Mongolia has long been the destination for thrill-seeking adventure travelers—as participants in the wonderfully chaotic Mongol Rally will attest—but the country is expanding beyond that niche as its tourism board sets its sights on attracting one million tourists per year. In 2023, the country launched visa-free travel for a further 34 nationalities—bringing the total up to 61—in a campaign that is set to run until 2025.

Saudi Arabia's Red Sea has both untouched desert and vibrant coral reefs—both of which will be part of ambitious sustainable tourism development in the destination.Sixteen hotels are already open in Saudi Arabia's Red Sea, with a Six Senses, Ritz Carlton, and St. Regis opening their doors to travelers in 2024.

Sought out year-round for its vibrant small towns, nature preserves, culinary hot spots—and its proximity to New York City—the region is humming with new opportunities for travelers to surrender themselves to its legendary landscapes in 2024.