New Year, new resolutions, new travel plans?

Tour operators traditionally have some of their busiest booking periods during the first few months of the year. Indeed, many of us will already have organised our journeys for 2024, building expectation for the great travel adventures to come.

When it came to planning our annual Hot List, we asked: what destinations make more sense to visit this year than any other? We’ve narrowed the list down to 24 (p154), each with a strong case as to why they should star in your 2024 travel calendars. Some were even so compelling that we couldn’t resist covering them in this issue, including an insightful feature on Mandela’s Cape Town (p68), a unique stay in Japan (p88) and a guide to Brazil’s Salvador da Bahia (p194).

We’re also sharing the results of our annual Reader Travel Awards (p176), for which some 91,000 of you voted on your most desirable destinations to visit around the world, as well as the tour operators you love to travel with.

For our first edition of 2024, we’ve gently refreshed our magazine’s design and fine-tuned our editorial content. We are now grouping together all of our first-person narratives into a new section called ‘Travelogues’, and we are also adding more pages dedicated to captivating travel stories from around the world. Further still, we’ve introduced a couple of new regular features, including a ‘Wildlife Encounters’ guide that kicks off with a piece on unsung Malawi (p200), plus a ‘Set-jetting’ (p37) article that unpicks the incredible real-life locations that make our favourite films and TV shows shine.

Last but not least, we are thrilled to welcome a new cohort of Contributing Editors to Wanderlust, alongside dedicated editors for our North America (Jacqui Agate) and sustainability (Ketti Wilhelm) content. You can read about the destinations they’re most excited about visiting on page eight.

As you plan your future travels, we hope to continue inspiring you to explore the world in a deeper, slower and more responsible way – in 2024 and beyond! Bon voyage, is the UK’S longest-running travel-media brand and the

Mark your calendars! (clockwise from top left) Whether wildlife-spotting in Canada’s High Arctic (p78), tracing the history of South African democracy on the streets of Cape Town (p68) or finding greener ways to explore the islands of Fiji (p112), this issue is packed with intriguing travel ideas for the year ahead