Adventure, wellness, backpacking, into the wild – ideas for your 2021 holiday wish list

50 Best Places to Travel (all in the US), 25 Bucket-List Adventures, 9 Once-In-A-Lifetime Trips – it’s the time of year when everyone is telling you where to go

In Asia-Pacific, go wild in Fiji’s highlands, take the kids to Super Nintendo World, or get value for money backpacking in Myanmar

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Watching the sunrise over the Taj Mahal in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India is just one of the bucket list trips travellers could try in 2021. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 5:15pm, 3 Jan 2021Updated: 2:12pm, 9 Feb 2021

As Covid-19 vaccination programmes roll out globally, travel publications and tour companies have begun compiling their destination tips and bucket list trips for 2021. Wide open spaces feature more prominently than city breaks.

Of course, travellers will face various restrictions for the foreseeable future. When we are finally able to venture overseas again, it’s likely we’ll need to pack “fit to fly” digital health passports that verify test results and vaccination records along with our sun cream.

Here, then, are some of the happening holiday spots, luxury excursions and value-for-money bolt-holes that will hopefully be welcoming tourists at some point this year.

Let’s kick off with Lonely Planet. In a departure from its traditional Best Cities, Regions and Countries countdown, the travel guidebook publisher has taken a new approach for 2021. Its nominations of the best places to visit all demonstrate a genuine commitment to sustainability, diversity or community.

Song Saa Private Island in Cambodia. Photo: Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Its picks include the 500-island archipelago of Palau, in Micronesia, the only country in the world that requests visitors make a pledge to act in an ecologically and culturally sensitive way, for the sake of future generations of Palauans. Indigenous cooking techniques and Maori culinary traditions in New Zealand are featured under the Diversity section, and homestays in the remote but dramatic Faroe Islands tick the Community box.