Every January the same question arrives, from clients and from friends at dinner: where should we actually go this year? Not the list the algorithms are serving everyone. The real one. So we asked our planners a blunter question instead: where are you spending your own leave and your own money in 2026? Five answers came back again and again, and none of them were the obvious ones.
Georgia, while the secret holds
Tbilisi has been 'about to happen' for a decade. It has quietly happened, and somehow the crowds still haven't caught up. You get a capital of sulphur baths, courtyard wine bars and faded grandeur gone soft at the edges, then the Caucasus an hour away, rising like a wall. Our planners go in September for the harvest in Kakheti, when families still press wine in buried clay vessels the way they have for eight thousand years, and every long table turns into a supra, the Georgian feast that makes godparents out of strangers. Georgia rewards eight to ten days and a serious appetite.
Rwanda, the long game
The gorillas are everything people say. An hour on a forested slope with a silverback rearranges something in you permanently. But the reason our team keeps going back to Rwanda is what surrounds that hour: Kigali's coffee shops and galleries, slow boat days on Lake Kivu, and Akagera, a savannah park most itineraries skip that now holds lion, rhino and almost nobody watching them. Trek early in the trip. Let the rest of the country bring your pulse back down.
Slovenia, Europe with the volume down
Half the appeal of Slovenia is logistical. Nothing is more than two hours from anything else, so one unhurried week covers alpine lakes, a pocket-sized capital built for evening strolls, cave systems that look invented for cinema and a sliver of Adriatic coast. The other half is the feeling. It has the scenery of its famous neighbours and a fraction of the queueing. June and September are the months to aim for.
Colombia, for the energy
Some trips calm you down. Colombia wakes you up. Cartagena in the evening is one of the great city experiences anywhere: music spilling from doorways, streets the colour of a fruit stall, dinner at ten because that is when it gets good. Then the coffee region, where you sleep on working fincas folded into green Andean hills, and Medellin, whose reinvention you should see for yourself rather than read about. Give it ten days at least.
Oman, for the calm
And when planners want quiet, they book Oman. It is the Gulf without the gloss: real souks in Muscat, wadis you swim through between date palms, and nights in the Sharqiya Sands where the silence has actual texture. It works beautifully as a single week, and it pairs with almost anything long-haul.
If one of these has been circling your head since the new year, that is probably your answer. Tell us where and roughly when, and a planner will sketch the whole trip, visa included, before the feeling fades.
