Travel

Our annual wanderlust guide from here, there, and everywhere. Where will 2026 take you?

Leo Daunt hasn’t just co-opted any old vintage mom-and-pop atmosphere of 1970s Montauk in the repurposing of his seaside motel. He's actually taken his mom and pop’s vibe and given it a cool rethink with glossy interiors and contemporary twists like Himalayan salt lamps in the rooms, outdoor fire pits, and a yoga pavilion — the better to cater to the values of the millennial traveler.

When I'm asked why I run so much, I usually say, only half-jokingly, "So that I can eat whatever I want." I am a runner. I just happen to go ultra-distances. Long races, hundreds of miles, sometimes over days. The other answers to that question are more serious: I run to stay fit and, more recently, to stay sane during insane times.

Romain Glouphile is a storyteller who understands the effect of a powerful narrative. Glouphile supplies Michelin star restaurants with local wine, meats, cheese, bread. In order words, exactly the things the Provençe-Alpes-Côte region of France is known for.

Health is wealth. And vice versa, too, at the newly-renovated Gurney's Saltwater Spa. I visited the 30,000-square-foot facility to have a look around, though I didn't try any of the treatments, so you'll have to decide for yourself whether wellness as an investment is a worthy concept.

A five-hour Sicilian food tour in New York City with Allison Scola, a sort of Rain Man of cannoli and all things Sicilian, is quite honestly the next best thing to visiting the famed Italian island in person.

The only drawback to holidaying in Burgundy, France's greatest food and wine region, is that you risk returning home fleshier and heavier than when you arrived. Unless, of course, you burn off the extra calories with a self-powered vacation on two wheels.

An email landed in my inbox sometime in March from Geoffrey Drummond, the executive director of the FoodLab at Stony Brook Southampton and a longtime producer and director of several cooking shows with Julia Child and Eric Ripert, as well as movies like "My Dinner with Andre."

About the same time that I sat down to write this, the hit television show "The White Lotus," about a group of guests in a high end hotel (the first season was filmed at Four Seasons Resort Maui) announced season two was being filmed in...drumroll...Sicily. This time, the setting is the Four Seasons San Domenico Palace in Taormino, a hilltop town on the east coast of the island, close to the infamous Mount Etna.

As East End hotels prepare to welcome summer guests in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the new must-have amenities will include face masks made from luxurious fabric, chic dispensers for hand sanitizer, body temperature scanners, aesthetically pleasing dividers to ensure people maintain six feet of social distance, and other items that allow people to feel safe and pampered.

City or coast? Culture capital or cowboy outpost? Progressive destination or old favorite? Browse our annual guide, compiled from recommendations by The Star Travel team and a few far-flung readers, to get inspired. Then, start packing.

The rugged canyons and sprawling ranches around Penjamo in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato are haunted with stories of hidden treasure, Catholics fleeing persecution by the Spanish crown, and of revolutionaries like Pancho Villa. Along with these tales, which straddle the line between the historic and the fantastic, are the extraordinary stories of ordinary people who went “al otro lado,” as the people in Penjamo say — to the other side.