This year is the 20th anniversary of New York Times Travel’s signature piece of journalism: the “52 Places to Go” list, which we publish each January.
To mark the anniversary, we decided to look back at how the list — and travel itself — has changed over the past 20 years.
Through old-fashioned reporting, Tariro Mzezewa, a Times Travel alumna, found that the list was born almost by chance: Toward the end of 2004, Stuart Emmrich, the Travel editor at the time, said that he and his staff members had noticed that many New Yorkers were going to Bhutan, and wondered what other destinations could become popular.
They compiled a list called “Where to Go,” with no numbers attached, and published it on Jan. 9, 2005. From that point, the list became an annual event, varying from year to year until 2014, when it finally settled in at “52 Places to Go,” one for each week of the year.
But identifying themes and inflection points in the list-making was more complicated.
Two decades of destinations add up. Through 2024, we had named 914 total places, including 145 countries, 366 cities and towns, and 41 U.S. states, as well as some major events like last year’s total solar eclipse. All told, it came to more than 300,000 words.
