9 Years of the New York Times' 'Places to Go' List

Each January the New York Times publishes its “Places to Go” list of travel destinations to consider in the coming year.

While dozens of other print and digital publishers vie for consumers’ attentions with their own annual travel lists, “Places to Go” is a powerful influencer in the travel-planning process. It is also an important list for tourism industry professionals, particularly destination marketers and management companies, to turn to when developing their tourism products and services in tandem with current and emerging trends.

In reviewing the Times’ 2016 “52 Places to Go” list of suggested destinations, Mexico, Spain, and France are clear winners, since each country has three of its destinations selected this year.

We’ve covered the past two years of selections with interviews with the editor behind the annual list (2014 is here, and 2015 here), but we thought it would be interesting to go a little deeper and look at how the destinations have been spread out since the list was started in 2008. We’ll try to identify and analyze these trends and, in turn, offer tourism industry professionals insight into patterns in how destinations are listed.

Between 2008 and 2016, 416 destination listings in 122 countries/territories have been presented on the “Places to Go” series. To help understand the trends, this analysis can be divided into four categories: amount, type, variety, and frequency. Here are the key findings:

Amount: For the purpose of this story, seven geographical regions have been identified in the travel list series. [see chart below] The Americas have the highest number of destination listings, averaging 16 per year. Europe follows with an average of 14 listings per year. Asia, with an average of eight listings per year, wraps up the top three spots.

With 22 countries featured, Africa is represented on average five times a year. At the bottom of the list are the Middle East and Oceana regions, averaging two listings per year.

With 416 destinations listings in 122 countries/territories, the average number of destination listings per country/territory is approximately three. 33 out of 122 countries/territories have higher than the average number of listings, 79 countries have lower than the average number, and 10 countries are on par with the average number of destination listings. Those 33 countries with higher than average