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ARGENTINA , ARGENTINA , ITINERARIES , SOUTH AMERICA · April 25, 2024 Last Updated on April 25, 2024

A WEEKEND GUIDE TO EL CALAFATE, ARGENTINA

Argentina is a country that boasts beautiful tourist sites. Due to the vastness of the country, limited time can be a challenge while traveling around, and most tourists choose only a few regions to visit. However, one destination that is…

BACHELORETTE , CALIFORNIA , GIRLS GETAWAY , NORTH AMERICA , UNITED STATES · April 22, 2024 Last Updated on April 22, 2024

THE ULTIMATE LAGUNA BEACH BACHELORETTE PARTY GUIDE

Laguna Beach is a lovely coastal city in Orange County, California. It’s known for its art galleries, fine dining, beautiful beaches and coves, and state parks. Laguna Beach is an ideal destination for a beach vacation, a girls’ getaway, or…

ANIMALS & WILDLIFE , CHARITIES WE LOVE , RESPONSIBLE TRAVEL , TRAVEL GIRLS GIVING · April 18, 2024 Last Updated on April 22, 2024

CHARITIES WE LOVE: PETA

Charities We Love is a series featuring inspirational charities from around the world. At We Are Travel Girls we care about giving back and hope this spotlight will help our readers discover organizations committed to bettering our planet. This week…

CARIBBEAN , ISLAND GUIDES , UNITED STATES · April 15, 2024 Last Updated on April 15, 2024

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO ST. THOMAS, U.S VIRGIN ISLANDS

On St. Thomas you will find crystal clear waters, luscious greenery, incredible views, picturesque beaches, and colorful villages. The stunning little island located in the West Indies is truly a paradise. When arriving in St. Thomas I was shocked at…

GIRLS GETAWAY , NORTH AMERICA , SPRING , UNITED STATES · April 7, 2024 Last Updated on April 7, 2024

10 BEST DESTINATIONS TO VISIT IN APRIL IN THE USA

April is a fantastic time to travel around the USA as it’s still in the shoulder season before summer crowds swell at the most popular destinations. This time of year also brings mild weather, fun festivals, and many events throughout…

CARIBBEAN , HIKING · April 2, 2024 Last Updated on April 2, 2024

A GUIDE TO HIKING VIRGIN ISLANDS NATIONAL PARK

The Virgin Islands National Park is a hiker’s dream. The lush forest and unexpected viewpoints of the Caribbean Sea will leave you in awe. Located on the quiet island of St. John in the United States Virgin Islands, The Virgin…

CALIFORNIA , LOS ANGELES , NORTH AMERICA , UNITED STATES · March 28, 2024 Last Updated on March 29, 2024

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE BURBANK, CALIFORNIA

Most people don’t know this, but I come from Hollywood lineage with a long history rooted in Burbank. My Grandma was iconic actress Debbie Reynolds. As a result, Burbank has always had a special place in my heart. So when…

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The world's most influential women travellers

By Michelle Jana Chan

Vote now! To cast your vote for the female traveller you think has had the most impact, enter our online poll now – results to be revealed soon.

Angelina Jolie

During her first trip as Special Envoy for the UN, on a layover in Paris en route to Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, the Hollywood actress noted in her diary that ‘an African man wearing a nice blue suit and a warm smile asked me if I was a journalist. I said, “No, just an American who wants to learn more about Africa .”' That was the Jolie before her dozens of field missions, meeting refugees from Kabul and Darfur as well as the Syria-Iraq border. In Notes from My Travels , she writes: ‘I feel I was not raised to seriously think outside my own country’ and describes her epiphany through exchanges with women in camps, kids begging and market vendors. ‘It will take me a while to recover from this trip and, of course, I hope I never do,’ she remarks on leaving Pakistan. While her column inches may focus on her films, her ex-husbands and her children adopted from all over the world (she has a tattoo on her shoulder of the coordinates of each child’s birthplace), Jolie’s UN work has taken her to more than 40 countries, and she is known to cover all her costs on missions. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said of her work for refugees: ‘I have seen how much they inspire her as she listens to them for hours on end. She has spent many days and nights in camps or at border crossings. I speak on behalf of the world’s refugees to say how grateful we are for her incredible dedication.’

Marie Colvin

With her signature pirate’s patch (she’d lost her eye in a grenade blast in Sri Lanka ), this frontline correspondent defied death numerous times – until she didn’t. In 2012, Colvin was killed in an airstrike while covering the siege of Homs in Syria. Tragically, Marie herself used to say, ‘No story is worth dying for, because there’s no story then'. The American journalist, who reported mostly for The Sunday Times , was known for her swearing, her smoking, her drinking, her PTSD, the La Perla bra she wore under her flak jacket, and her strong belief in the need to bear witness to the atrocities of war from Iraq to Afghanistan, East Timor to Kosovo and Chechnya to Libya. Her writing was spare, incisive, even painful to read. ‘In Basra, they say the day belongs to Iraq; the night to Iran. Iraq’s second city is under siege, and Iranian shells slammed into houses for the 70th successive day yesterday,’ she typed in 1987. Colvin didn’t deny the indecision she sometimes felt; sentiments such as ‘What am I doing?’ in emails to friends were quickly followed by ‘Story incredibly important, though’. ‘Bravery is not being afraid to be afraid,’ she once said. In the foreword to On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin , her sister wrote that she hopes ‘Marie will continue to inspire young women everywhere, as they dream of the difference just one girl can make in the world’.

Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah

‘I am an Arab through and through,’ says the queen consort of Jordan, ‘but I am also one who speaks the international language.’ Palestinian by nationality, Rania was born in Kuwait, spent her summers visiting relatives in the West Bank, spoke Arabic at home and English at school. She says she carried hummous sandwiches in her packed lunch, while a classmate brought peanut butter and jam; she imagined theirs would be ‘disgusting’, but when she tried it, she thought it was ‘heavenly’ (a story she wrote down and turned into a children’s’ book, The Sandwich Swap ). It was a small step towards fuelling a desire for east-west exchange and cross-border adventures. She went off to study at the American University in Cairo and was there when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Her family fled to Jordan , she joined them, there hobnobbed with royalty and ended up marrying the future king. In 1999, at the age of 28, she became the youngest queen in the world when her husband took the throne and became King Abdullah II. She has redefined the modern monarch during her world tours of duty — while connecting with nearly five million Instagram and 10.4 million Twitter followers (where her profile reads: ‘a mum and a wife with a really cool day job’). Her charity, the Jordan River Foundation helps rural women find a way to sell their traditional crafts: Queen Rania likes to quote the African proverb: ‘As you educate a woman, you educate the family,’ she says. ‘If you educate the girls, you educate the future.’

Amelia Earhart

It only took a single plane ride at an air show in California and Earhart was hooked: ‘By the time I had got 200 or 300 feet off the ground, I knew I had to fly,’ said the American aviation trailblazer. Working as a truck driver, photographer and stenographer to save for flying lessons, she secured her license and bought a yellow bi-plane she named The Canary , going on to break records, from highest altitude climbs to fastest flights. The gung-ho tomboy teamed up with publicist George Putnam, who she married on his seventh proposal, telling him that marriage is a partnership ‘with dual control’. Some say he turned an average pilot into a legend, but there’s no denying Earhart alone spearheaded her successful attempt to be the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932. Her dream of circumnavigating the globe ‘as near its waistline as could be’ led to her last flight. In July 1937, she vanished over the Pacific. She wasn’t yet 40, and was never seen again.

Jane Goodall

‘How could you possibly love travelling 300 days a year,’ asks English primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, 84, ‘when it’s just hotels and meetings, all the lines at security, the terrible pat-you-downs and how they treat you like a criminal?’ Goodall details her flights for the next few months: Bangkok , Taiwan (which she loves), Beijing , Chengdu, Hong Kong , then Greece , Spain and France . She drags around a suitcase she named the Coffin, full of books, a single-cup electrical-heating element and a jar of Marmite, and always carries a stuffed toy monkey called Mr H. Yet the pioneering researcher-turned-activist doesn’t plan to change her schedule any time soon. Her lectures are near-evangelistic, often provoking tears and ovations. ‘They’ve been selling out, sometimes 5,000 seats in one day,’ she says. Goodall was 10, reading Dr Doolittle and Tarzan , when she decided ‘to live with wild animals in Africa’. After school, a friend invited her to Kenya and she worked as a waitress to save up for her boat passage to Mombasa in 1957. There she met the palaeontologist Louis Leakey who gave her the opportunity to work as a chimpanzee researcher, even fast-tracking her place at Cambridge so she would be qualified. She then spent half a century observing the chimpanzees at Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania , tearing up the book on what we thought we knew of animal behaviour and inspiring a cultish obsession with our closest relative in the animal kingdom.

Valentina Tereshkova

In 1963, this Russian cosmonaut blasted off in the Vostok 6 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, becoming the first woman in space at only 26. Tereshkova orbited the planet 48 times and flew 1.2 million miles (barely eating, she says, because the tube-fed food was so disgusting). During the three-day mission, she racked up more hours solo in space than all American spacemen combined at the time. Her call sign was Chaika (Russian for seagull), given to her by Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. On her way up, she said: ‘Hey sky, take off your hat, I’m on my way!’ and was reprimanded by Gagarin, who was listening in. He hardly had cause, given that Tereshkova was game enough to continue the odd tradition he had started of peeing on the tyre of the transfer bus to the launch pad. After her landmark mission, she travelled the world before going into politics, and at 81 Tereshkova is still shaping policy as a member of the State Duma. An advocate of women’s rights, she complained that systems and spacesuits were designed by men for men. ‘A bird cannot fly with only one wing,’ she said. ‘Human space flight cannot develop any further without the active participation of women.’ She still dreams about going into space and would agree to a one-way Mars mission in a heartbeat. ‘I am ready,’ she affirms.

Martha Gellhorn

Franklin D Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor so admired the chain-smoking war correspondent’s work that she invited her to live in the White House, which Gellhorn actually did for a while. Imagine that happening in 2019. However, life in Washington DC didn’t quite give Gellhorn her fix. Born in St Louis in 1908 to publicly progressive parents, she started out covering the horrors of the Great Depression and, after bunking down in the White House in 1934, wanted to get back to the battlefields of Vietnam , Nicaragua and the Middle East. Conflict was what made this striking beauty tick. She swung between affairs, most famously with Ernest Hemingway . The pair met in a bar in Key West and did eventually marry (with roast moose for the wedding feast). The early days of their life together were spent covering the Spanish Civil War from Madrid’s frequently shelled Hotel Florida, and they tried to build a home in Cuba, listening to Chopin’s Mazurka in C Major while Gellhorn planted a garden of dahlias, petunias and morning glories. But the relationship didn’t last. Lured back to Europe, she reported on the Blitz and joined British bomber crews on raids over Germany. On D-Day, Gellhorn managed to get ashore while the rest of the press corps – including Hemingway – watched from the sea through binoculars. Her shattering writing certainly brought the wider world home in a new way. She described herself as ‘permanently dislocated – un voyageur sur la terre ’ and worked into her ninth decade, covering the American invasion of Panama in 1989.

Kris Tompkins

The extreme conservationist behind one of the greatest land legacies ever, California-born Tompkins chose to carve out her adult life thousands of miles from home, in Patagonia. ‘We would fly almost every day, in all kinds of weather, scoping out new conservation possibilities. We learned to love the landscape – even more so from above. I would attribute a lot of our understanding of the earth from our thousands of hours of flying together.’ She speaks of ‘we’ a lot, referring to her late second husband Doug Tompkins, who died in 2015. Together she and Doug (who both made their millions separately with outdoor-clothing companies – he as the co-founder of The North Face, Inc and she the ex-CEO of rival Patagonia) tirelessly worked to preserve the pristine wilderness and rainforest on both the Chilean and Argentinian sides of the border. And now she’s pushing on with their land-restoration work, recently donating more than a million acres to the Chilean government chiefly in the Patagonia and Pumalín National Parks. ‘Getting people travelling was absolutely one of our goals; we didn’t make everything private and put a lock on it; we wanted people to get out into the wild and fall in love again. If they think a place is fabulous, then they can’t sit back and do nothing to try to protect it; we need deeply rooted responsibility.’ Curiously, she feels like she came late to travelling: ‘I’m not a very good holiday person. There needs to be a reason for hitting the road, associated with work or teaching me how the earth is degrading.’ Upcoming trips include South Georgia Island, one of her favourite places, and sailing through the Northwest Passage – both cold places, but ‘I have pretty good gear,’ she says, smiling.

Freya Stark

Stark was 100 when she died and it was a life that could not have been richer or fuller. Born in 1893, she chronicled her journeys to remote regions of the Middle East in some of the world’s most poetic travel literature, first visiting French Lebanon in 1927, slipping through a military cordon surrounding the Druze, while carrying ‘a copy of Dante’s Inferno , very little money, a revolver and a fur coat.’ She went on to investigate the mysterious assassins of Persia, became the first Western woman to explore Luristan in Iran , followed the ancient frankincense route, ventured to northern Yemen in 1940 and finally settled to live in Baghdad. She was drawn to remote and risky places, choosing to go alone, and remarking that she found confronting danger a way of 'passing through fear, to the absence of fear'. Her seven languages, mostly self-taught, helped her research an impressive body of work that includes The Valley of the Assassins , The Hadhramaut , Letters from Syria , Beyond Euphrates , Riding to the Tigris and The Minaret of Djam — books that have inspired a generation of travel writers with their evocative descriptions of harems and caravans. After her death in Asolo in north-east Italy , the newspapers referred to her as ' la regina nomade '.

The South Sudanese musician is a traveller in the rawest sense, having been a refugee her entire life. Born on an unknown date around 1983, at the height of the Second Sudanese Civil War, she saw her family torn apart. Aged 10, she lost her mother; her father raped and threatened to kill her. She fled to Khartoum but was repeatedly sexually abused by her employers. When she eventually made it to a refugee camp in Kenya and managed to find her brother, Emmanuel Jal, who had become an acclaimed hip-hop artist, the pair recorded a song called ‘Gua’ (meaning peace in their native Nuer tongue); it reached number one in Kenya. Nyaruach also went public with her life story in War Child , the award-winning documentary focusing on her brother’s time as a child soldier. In 2013, she was invited to Aswan, Egypt, to take part in the Nile Project, which represented the region’s best musicians, culminating in a concert in Cairo. Now a single mother of two living in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, Nyaruach is facing travel restrictions, but she and her brother have put out an Afrobeat album, Naath , and are aiming to tour the UK and the USA this year. The music, inspired by traditional folklore, reflects on the resilient culture of their homeland. Nyaruach says that she wants to help prevent women and children of war from losing hope. A hero for our times, surely.

Robyn Davidson

‘Perhaps all Australians have some sense of the desert buried in their psyches,’ says intrepid adventurer Davidson. Her own fascination stemmed from being raised on a cattle station – ‘those early sensual signals of dry air and the smell of arid grass’. She remembers feeling restless, wanting ‘to do something big and challenging’. She moved from Sydney to Alice Springs in 1975, got a job as a waitress and two years later, aged 26, embarked on a nine-month, 1,700-mile trek from the Northern Territory to the coast, across a ‘transcendent landscape’, with her dog and four camels. It was documented in National Geographic , then in her book Tracks (which she wrote at the London home of novelist Doris Lessing) and on the big screen, in the Golden Lion-nominated film starring Mia Wasikowska. Davidson tells of the extreme heat, poisonous snakes and lecherous men – but the journey ends in triumph, swimming with her camels in the Indian Ocean . She was occasionally joined by journalist Rick Smolan, who photographed her progress, and by Eddie, an indigenous man who walked her through the Jameson Ranges. Since Tracks , she has studied and written about nomadic people, and spends several months a year in the Himalayas . She writes hoping her readers too will consider choosing ‘an adventure of the spirit’.

Her hair may have greyed in her early thirties, but Arnold reached the grand age of 99, having spent her long life behind the lens after she was given a $40 Rolleicord camera by a boyfriend. In New York she shot ‘drunken bums sleeping in the Bowery and sun glinting off rope’ and loved it so much she abandoned a medical degree to become the first woman member of the award-winning Magnum agency, where photographers retain full copyright. Raised in Philadelphia by Ukrainian immigrants, Arnold was mostly self-taught, with a dash of guidance from Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch. Her photojournalism had a critical social eye, seeking an intimacy with subjects from minority to celebrity, Malcolm X to Marilyn Monroe. When she photographed men, they became ‘flirtatious and fun’ and female subjects felt ‘less as if they’re expected to be in a relationship’. Hers was a life on the road, as seen in the portraits of Mongolian horse trainers, Chinese factory workers, Cuban prostitutes and political prisoners in Russia . When away on assignment she would queue for hours to phone her son. ‘If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given,’ she said.

Laura Dekker

The uniquely determined Dutch-born Dekker is the youngest person to sail solo around the world – she was just 14 when she set off. The challenge to get her out on the water was astonishing in itself: social services tried to stop her because of her age. They went to court and Dekker won; she says those memories keep her up at night more than fears of pirates. The voyage went ahead in 2010, commencing in Gibraltar. What followed were 518 days alone on the 38ft, two-masted Guppy , fitting in her homework and learning to play the flute to pass the time. Every teenage schoolgirl worth her salt read Dekker’s blog, and she celebrated her feat by eating doughnuts on the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten before deciding against going home, sailing on to Whangarei, New Zealand the port where she had been born (her parents had moored here two years into a seven-year sailing trip, and she spent her first five years at sea). Dekker turned her experience into a no-gloss documentary, Maidentrip , and a book, One Girl One Dream . And she’s still living on a boat.

Bessie Coleman

Born a decade before the Wright Brothers even attempted flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Coleman became the first African-American woman to hold a pilot’s licence. The daughter of a black mother and a mixed-race father, Coleman laboured in the cotton fields of Texas with her 12 sisters and brothers as a child. But unlike most Americans of that era, she finished high school, then went on to study at Langston University, dropping out only because she could not afford the fees. Later, while working as a manicurist at the White Sox Barber Shop in Chicago , she saw pictures in the newspapers of airforce pilots and started to dream. One of her brothers teased her: ‘You ain’t never goin’ to fly. Not like those women I saw in France’ (he had served in Europe during World War I). That galvanised her completely. After all the American flying schools turned her down, Coleman signed up for French lessons and applied to France ’s most elite flight school – where she learnt to fly, as well as to master stunts such as tailspins. On returning to the USA in 1921, she was unable to become a commercial pilot because of her race and gender and worked as a stunt pilot, declining to appear at any air show that refused entry to blacks. Her motto was ‘No Uncle Tom stuff for me’. She overturned social conventions – smoking cigarettes, heading out without a chaperone – and had ‘plans to establish a flying school and teach the Negro to fly so they will able to serve their country better’, but she died before her dream could be realised. She was killed, aged just 34, during a test flight (her mechanic was piloting), when the plane went into a spin and she fell out of the open cockpit.

Hanli Prinsloo

When record-breaking South African freediver Prinsloo gives talks, she demonstrates the slowing down of her breathing, quite fascinating in itself. She also reminds everyone that every second inhalation we take comes from the ocean. ‘It’s not only the trees that supply our oxygen,’ she says. Unsurprisingly, she prefers to travel by boat than plane, but can’t avoid getting on flights given she teaches the sport all over the world — in the company of whale sharks in Madagascar , humpback whales in the South Pacific and orcas in Norway . But her favourite marine creatures are dolphins: ‘they make eye contact, twirl around you until they’re dizzy with the absolute joy of the connection,’ she says. To stay healthy — critical in this line of work — she ‘pops loads of vitamins, drinks gallons of water’ and to avoid coughs and colds uses Uber rather than public transport (regrettably, she adds). It’s been a long journey from her rural beginnings growing up on a land-locked farm, but from an early age Prinsloo had a dream to become a mermaid (she and her sister even had their own mermaid language). She couldn’t afford to attend university in South Africa, but heard you could study for free in Sweden if you spoke Swedish; she moved there, learnt the language in six months and signed up to study acting in Gothenburg. A college buddy introduced her to freediving and Prinsloo showed promise. On graduation, she moved to the Red Sea to dedicate herself to the sport. After smashing 11 world-bests and notching up a staggering breath-hold of five minutes 39 seconds, she gave up competing. Now her time is split between teaching and running her charity I Am Water, that shows underprivileged children living in coastal communities the wonder of their marine backyard, aiming to educate and rouse the next generation of conservationists. ‘I am terrified of our reckless overfishing,’ she says. ‘We run the risk of literally eating our oceans empty.’ Yet she’s always upbeat and positive: ‘It is a complex situation with many challenges, but also many solutions.’

Cheryl Strayed

Obsessed with travel since she was a ‘kid in elementary school, looking at maps on classroom walls imagining all the ways (her) life would be expanded if (she) got to Australia or New York City or South Africa ’, Strayed grew up without money for plane tickets and hotel rooms. She battled with heroin and a messy divorce. But she managed to notch up the miles on the cheap exploring the US in her 1979 Chevy LUV pickup called Myrtle, which she fitted out with a twin-sized futon. ‘I was very bold sleeping in the back… it wasn’t locked… anyone could have come in… but that helped give me the courage to be out in the wilderness.’ And Strayed (her made-up, adopted name for herself) is best known for finding her escape in the wilderness – hiking along the Pacific Crest Trail – which she wrote about in her New York Times bestseller Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found , later turned into the film starring Reese Witherspoon. Oprah Winfrey even relaunched her Book Club in part to share Strayed’s intelligently, elegantly written memoir. Yes, it is a travelogue, but it’s also an extraordinary message on how travelling, exploring, sheer physical movement can be a balm, can bring about meaningful resolution. ‘Barely a day’s passed (since publishing Wild ) that I haven’t met or received an email from someone who’s said to me, “I went and did this because of you, I hiked the PCT or another trail,”' Strayed says. ‘I’m deeply honoured that people read Wild and do that.’ Now married with two children living in a Prairie Craftsman home in Portland , Oregon, she’s trying to give her family the experiences she wished she’d had growing up. ‘I pull the kids out of school and we go travelling for a couple of months. They’ve been to 27 countries. It’s an important part of their education.’ Upcoming, she vows ‘to return to New Zealand, that’s top of my list,’ and ‘I turned 50 last month, so I’ve promised myself I’m going to get myself to Italy within the year.’

Dian Fossey

The National Geographic image of a passionate intrepid scientist ensconced among the Virunga volcanoes with a family of affectionate mountain gorillas is not the whole truth. Nor is her 1983 book, Gorillas in the Mist , later made into the film in which she was played by Sigourney Weaver. The American primatologist was also known as a bully, intimidating her staff, behaving erratically, traits further exacerbated by her hard drinking habits. Yet she had her admirers – in wonder at her total commitment, call it obsessive, to these majestic animals that were being heavily poached at the time. After travelling extensively throughout Africa , she founded the Karisoke Research Centre and based herself here in Rwanda’s cloud forest. Of her first ever encounter with the species, she was struck by ‘their individuality combined with the shyness of their behaviour’. But her extreme single-mindedness to protect the animals and her unpredictable ways isolated her. Relationships soured with the local community, with fellow researchers and conservationists. Those who cared about her begged her to leave and take up a university position back in the USA. But her calling was too strong. She remained — and was murdered two days after Christmas in 1985 at the age of 48. The exact circumstances of her death still remain unclear, but she had many enemies. Appropriately she lies in the burial ground of her research gorillas, including her favourite, Digit. On her tomb the plaque reads: ‘No one loved gorillas more.’ It might be difficult to love Fossey, but she made the world love gorillas.

Harriet Chalmers Adams

‘I’ve wondered why men have so absolutely monopolised the field of exploration,’ she told The New York Times in 1912. ‘I’ve never found my sex a hinderment; never faced a difficulty which a woman, as well as a man, could not surmount; never felt a fear of danger; never lacked courage to protect myself.’ Adams helped found the Society of Women Geographers after being refused entry to the men-only Explorers Club – despite a lifetime spent on the road. Born in California , this fearless, multilingual photo-journalist’s first forays took her to Mexico when she was 24, followed by a two-year trip from the Andes to the Amazon, and later crossing Haiti by horseback — documenting her travels in National Geographic magazine. Fascinated by tales of migration, she followed Christopher Columbus’s route through the West Indies, the Spanish conquistadores’ crusades into South America and Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage from Spain to the Philippines, as well as covering World War I from the trenches of France . All that squeezed into 61 years; she settled and died in Nice, perhaps at its Mediterranean loveliest, in 1937.

Jeanne Baret

Born in France in 1740, Baret was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe – disguised as a man, of course; at the time women were forbidden on French navy ships. She’d been working as housekeeper to, before becoming the lover of, naturalist Philibert de Commerçon, who’d been invited to join the round-the-world expedition of Commander Louis Antoine de Bougainville. Feigning to be his male valet, and dressed up in loose-fitting clothes, her chest strapped flat with strips of linen, she and De Commerçon set sail on the Étoile in December 1766. For two years they managed to maintain the fiction, no mean feat given there were 116 men on board living in close quarters. Ship journals are contradictory, but there is some suggestion she pronounced herself a eunuch when suspicions were raised about her gender; other accounts hint at violence and rape. Meanwhile, Baret pressed on with her work, particularly because De Commerçon was sickly on board; in Rio de Janeiro , it was she who ventured ashore — plucking a flower to be named after the captain, bougainvillaea. Over the course of the voyage, the pair collected more than 6,000 botanical samples from around the world, disembarking the ship in Mauritius — the circumstances unclear — to continue their botanical studies.

Junko Tabei

In spring 1975, just after the Vietnam War finally drew to a close and as Diane von Furstenberg’s wrap dresses were selling in their millions and Tammy Wynette’s 'Stand By Your Man' was blaring from Roberts Radios across the UK, a 35-year-old, five-foot-tall Japanese climber became the first woman to scale Mount Everest as part of an all-female team she had put together. Think about the more localised context and her achievements are even more brilliant. ‘Back in 1970s Japan , men were the ones to work outside and women were asked just to serve tea,’ she said. Yet against this backdrop, Tabei started the Ladies Climbing Club and worked more than one job to fund expeditions — as an editor of a scientific journal, a piano tutor and teaching English. Funding requests were blanked with responses such as ‘You should be raising children instead'. Which, by the way, she was. As she climbed Everest, back home her daughter turned three (Tabei drew a birthday cake on a postcard and sent it from High Camp). At the summit, she remembered thinking: ‘Oh, I don’t have to climb any more,’ an idea that didn’t last long. She was first woman to notch up the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent. Even after being diagnosed with cancer, she continued to climb. At 76, she had scaled the highest peaks of 76 countries, while promoting sustainable mountaineering and lesser-known climbing areas. She died a year later.

Dervla Murphy

It was soon after her 10th birthday and the gift of a second-hand bicycle from her parents that Murphy resolved to cycle to India . She writes: ‘I have never forgotten the exact spot, on a steep hill near Lismore, where this decision was made. Half-way up, I rather proudly looked at my legs, slowly pushing the pedals around, and the thought came: “If I went on doing this for long enough, I could get to India.”’ That journey, 20 years later, was documented in Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle , passing through Afghanistan (where she says she became ‘Afghanatical’, describing the country as ‘a man after my own heart’) and Pakistan (where she was a guest of the last Wali of Swat Miangul Aurangzeb). Her writing has become unapologetically political: the struggles post-apartheid in South from the Limpopo: Travels Through South Africa ; The Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe , exploring the impact of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa ; and Visiting Rwanda , reflecting on the 1994 genocide. A prolific writer, at 87 she’s written 24 travel books covering 54 countries, with adventures such as meeting a tiger when cycling through the Nepalese Terai, watching the emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie single-handedly quell a student riot in Addis Ababa and losing her packhorse – panicked by a leopard – camping in the mountains of Cameroon.

Gertrude Bell

Often called a female Lawrence of Arabia, this Englishwoman was arguably much more. Born into wealth and privilege in 1868, Bell read Modern History at Oxford , one of the few subjects women were allowed to study at the time. She headed off on her travels: spending years moving around the Middle East – from Tehran to Jerusalem to Beirut to Damascus – and became fluent in Persian, Arabic, French and German, as well as speaking Italian and Turkish, and holding titles such as Liaison Officer, Correspondent to Cairo and Oriental Secretary for the British government. At the end of the war, Bell was pivotal in drawing up the borders of modern-day Iraq and shaping the country's politics. She has been described as ‘one of the few representatives of His Majesty’s Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection’. A mean mountaineer as well, she also spent time in the Alps , summiting both La Meije and Mont Blanc, and had one peak in the Bernese Oberland, Gertrudspitze, named after her. Praise back in the day was hardly that, such as: she has ‘masculine vigour, hard common sense and practical efficiency – all tempered by feminine charm and a most romantic spirit’. Bell lived out her last days in Baghdad, where she took up again archaeology, founding what became the National Museum of Iraq.

Maureen Wheeler

Wheeler grew up in a housing estate in Belfast , but she had dreams far beyond the borders of Northern Ireland. With her new husband Tony, they hit the hippie trail and backpacked from the UK to Australia in the early 1970s – a wholly different time when Kabul was a must-see, many of Thailand ’s beaches were still undiscovered and Bali had but a few rudimentary hostels. When the couple arrived in Australia they were flat broke with just 27 cents in their pocket, but they’d been inspired by their journey. They set about writing a guidebook, which they called Across Asia on The Cheap , sticking it together around their kitchen table with foul-smelling glue, before trying to peddle it to friends and then bookshops. The year was 1972 and Lonely Planet was born, which was set to become the world’s biggest travel guidebook outfit (35 years later BBC Worldwide bought the publishing company for tens of millions). Maureen never stopped travelling, even when she was at her busiest with the company and with her two children. In fact, she wrote Travel With Children as a shout-out to parents who were hesitant to hit the road with their families, including practical tips and, in the latest edition, travel stories written by her kids. Critically, Lonely Planet carries on the mission that independent travel is easy and doesn’t cost a fortune – and that has inspired millions to haul on a backpack and head off across the world.

Karen Blixen

‘I had a farm in Africa , at the foot of the Ngong Hills…’ is probably one of the most evocative film openings, conjuring up a dreamily romantic view of life in Africa, played out by Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. It was based, of course, on Karen Blixen’s memoir Out of Africa , published under her pen name Isak Dinesen. After an aristocratic upbringing in Denmark , schooled there and in Switzerland , Blixen and her Swedish second cousin, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, moved to Kenya , marrying in Mombasa before heading to the Rift Valley to learn Swahili and set up a coffee plantation: ‘Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions, here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams!’ The dream faded, though – Blixen grew weary of her husband’s long hunting trips and affairs, perhaps contracting syphilis from him, which she suffered from throughout her life. They divorced, but she continued to run the farm, now single-handedly, fighting drought, fire and creditors. She fell in love with the English big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, with whom she travelled all over the country, at her happiest up in the clouds in his de Havilland Gipsy Moth. When his plane crashed, his death, coupled with the failure of the farm, forced Blixen to leave Kenya for good. She was a beguiling conversationalist, husky in voice (she smoked constantly) and with a piercing gaze, and above all was a luminous and prolific writer of books that set travel hearts racing, nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature twice; when Ernest Hemingway won, he suggested it should have gone to her.

Born James in 1926, Morris started his career as a young intelligence officer in Palestine and Italy during World War II and later, as a news journalist, meeting Che Guevara, visiting Hiroshima after the nuclear bomb and reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Of his many scoops, his greatest was Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s Everest climb in May 1953. He received the news of their summiting when James himself was at 23,000ft, dressed in short sleeves, and he scrambled down the mountain to despatch his copy – in code to avoid competitors stealing the story. ‘Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement’ actually meant success. James married, had children, and in 1972, he became Jan, a transition from man to woman documented in Conundrum, a powerful account that sees Jan and her lifelong partner Elizabeth emerging as heroines to lead their close-knit family. Morris’s essays, biographies and novels, including intimate portraits of Trieste, Oxford , New York , Hong Kong and Venice , have shaped our idea of what it is to go abroad, and what it is to belong. The impressive collection A Writer's World: Travels 1950–2000 reflects the life of a compulsive traveller, although during the final stages of her life before she sadly passed away in November 2020, she was mostly ensconced in her converted stable home in north-west Wales , ‘tired of taking my shoes off at airports’.

Annie Smith Peck

Amelia Earhart once toasted her, saying ‘I felt an upstart compared to Miss Peck. [Her] mountain climbing résumé gives me the impression I am just a softie. However, I am somehow comforted by the fact that [she] would make almost anyone appear soft.’ Black-and-white photographs of Peck show her heading off on expeditions wearing veiled hats with a brooch at her collar, before she changes her clothes and is snapped clutching an ice axe on mountain summits and zip-lining the Iguazu River. When the American famously climbed the Matterhorn in 1895 aged 45, the headlines focused on her wearing trousers. Fifteen years later she became the first climber to summit Mount Huascarán in Peru (at the age of 58)— pledging ‘to attain some height where no man had previously stood’. The epitaph of the scholar, suffragist and political activist reads: ‘you have brought uncommon glory to women of all time.’

Sarah Marquis

The 46-year-old Swiss explorer first ran away from home aged six, heading into the woods with her backpack and her father’s dog Sultan. ‘I was always a wild kid, the weirdo of the family,’ Marquis says. ‘My mum once called the police. They found me about an hour’s walk away. I’d spent the night in a cave full of bats.’ Marquis has turned that weirdness into a career — as a speaker and writer, recently nominated as National Geographic Adventurer of the Year. She’s not a scientist but likes to have a fact-finding mission to her expeditions, because ‘we need nature today more than ever.’ Her last trip was three months solo walking the west coast of Tasmania , collecting data on plant life for the Australian government; while there, she fell down a gorge, broke a shoulder and continued to carry her 35kg backpack on it for the next three days. Next she’s off to northern Canada to train for an upcoming expedition — by contrast, this time in the desert. The common theme is that she prefers to be alone. ‘I’m not good with teams,’ she admits. ‘People ask me: are you scared? and I say ‘of what?’. When she occasionally returns home, she retreats to a small cabin in the Swiss Alps — before she hears again the call of the wild. ‘I’ve explored our darkest corners through pain and fear,’ she says, ‘and I deal with the things that we don’t want to deal with because that’s what makes you powerful.’

Cristina Mittermeier

From small-town middle-class Mexico , her only travels as a child were once a year to Disneyland in Los Angeles but she was inspired to go further after reading the novels of Emilio Salgari, who ‘painted a picture of places that struck my imagination’. Mittermeier went on to study marine biology, imagining it would be more about ‘pirate ships and swimming with dolphins’ than the realities of ‘fisheries and exploitation’, a strange start for a woman who now runs SeaLegacy, the powerful ocean conservation non-profit. It’s been a long journey. In fact, for this award-winning 52-year-old photographer, it’s extraordinary to think she didn’t pick up a camera till she was 24. Then married to the president of Conservation International whose trips took them all around the world, she borrowed his camera and took a first snap of an indigenous community in Brazil which turned out to become the outside advertising banner for an Amazonian art exhibition at the Natural History Museum of Houston. She went back to school to study fine-art photography, while following her husband with their family to more than 100 countries. Then she started her own expeditions, established the International League of Conservation Photographers and now spends only a couple of months a year at home on Vancouver Island with her partner Paul Nicklen, also a marine biologist and photographer. The rest of the time they’re on the road posting for their millions of Instagram followers . Her latest book, Amaze , is just that, a 250-page book showcasing indigenous people from Ethiopia to Papua New Guinea to Greenland .

Noo Saro-Wiwa

This 42-year-old Nigerian writer grew up in Surrey , which she describes as ‘a bountiful paradise of Twix bars and TV cartoons and leylandii trees, far removed from the heat and chaos of Nigeria’ where you see ‘machine guns, tuxedos, army fatigues and evening frocks together at an airport.’ Her book Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria , is a brave first foray into travel literature; Noo’s father Ken Saro-Wiwa, who campaigned against government corruption, was executed by the military dictatorship of his country in 1995. Noo had spent childhood summers in Port Harcourt on the Niger Delta but after this, she didn’t return for 10 years (except for his funeral and burial), wanting nothing more to do with the country. But in time she began tackling the subject of homeland, the same way she’d approached writing guidebooks (on Ivory Coast, Guinea, Madagascar , Benin, Ghana and Togo for Lonely Planet and Rough Guides) and writes that she came ‘to love many things about Nigeria: our indigenous heritage, the dances, the masks, the music, the baobab trees and the drill monkeys’. ‘I’ve been amazed by how many people have written to me and told me they knew nothing about Nigeria and how I opened their eyes,’ she says. ‘I feel I have a responsibility there.’ She’s now penning a book about Africans who live in China , a country she’s fallen in love with (‘after China, everything feels very boring,’ she says), then plans one on the Niger Delta, followed by Switzerland , which she calls ‘the heart of darkness of Europe’.

Anisa Kamadoli Costa

A rooted New Yorker in every way, down to her immigrant parents (Costa’s mother is from Maharashtra, her father from Karnataka in India ), the Tiffany & Co Chief Sustainability Officer isn’t just sitting comfortably with her feet up on a Fifth Avenue mahogany desk. She spends at least half of the year on the road, personally overseeing her projects for the Tiffany & Co Foundation: opposing a proposed mine on Alaska’s Bristol Bay that would sit at the headwaters of one of the world’s greatest salmon fisheries and leading journalists to the Great Barrier Reef to raise awareness of ocean conservation. ‘Most people just don’t consider how important the oceans are to the world,’ Costa says. Her background includes stints at the US Mission to the United Nations and working for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund with the goal of ‘making sure Americans travel more’. She has spearheaded Tiffany’s support of the virtual-reality film Valen’s Reef about Indonesia’s Raja Ampat marine life (where 75 per cent of the planet’s coral species can be found) and champions the company’s ecological commitment, with all the profits from dedicated jewellery lines funding conservation projects. ‘When I travel I always try to think about the place as a whole, rather than just its airport code,’ she says.

Our 'Women Who Travel' Facebook Group – 120k-strong and growing fast – helped select the final line-up. Join the group and the conversation at facebook.com/groups/womenwhotraveltheworld .

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The Best New Hotels in the United States: 2024 Hot List

By CNT Editors

It’s inevitable: Every spring when we pull together the Hot List , our annual collection of the world’s best new hotels, restaurants, and cruise ships, a staffer remarks that this latest iteration has got to be the best one ever. After a year’s worth of traveling the globe—to stay the night at a converted farmhouse in the middle of an olive grove outside Marrakech, or sail aboard a beloved cruise line’s inaugural Antarctic voyage—it’s easy to see why we get attached. But this year’s Hot List, our 28th edition, might really be the best one ever. It’s certainly our most diverse, featuring not only a hotel suite that was once Winston Churchill’s office, but also the world’s largest cruise ship and restaurants from Cape Town to Bali. We were surprised and inspired by this year’s honorees, and we know you will be too. These are the Hot List hotel winners for 2024.

Click here to see the entire Hot List for 2024 .

All listings featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. If you book something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

The Celestine — New Orleans Arrow

Built in 1791 as a private residence in the fabled French Quarter , The Celestine marks the glowing return to what its storied former tenants—the Creole chemist Antione Peychaud, responsible for his namesake bitters and a female hotelier who ran the fashionable Maison Deville hotel (where Tennesse Williams is said to have penned A Streetcar Named Desire )—would have enjoyed. The property, named after Peychaud’s wife, was lovingly restored by local restaurateur and hotelier Robert LeBlanc (The Chloe), interior designer Sara Costello (The Chloe), and cocktail whiz Neal Bodenheimer (Cure, Cane + Table). A stylish sprawl of 10 rooms features antique furniture, four-poster beds, pencil drawings, and a trove of 19th-century oil paintings discovered in the building’s attic. Sip a Sazerac from your balcony or descend into the dimly-lit Pecyhaud’s Bar for a nip. Outside, a tropical-fringed courtyard with a babbling fountain is a delightful spot for a Ramos Gin Fizz amid the sounds of jazz music wafting from the legendary Court of Two Sisters next door. From $225. —Kate Donnelly

Dawn Ranch — Sonoma, California Arrow

Over the past few years, long-bohemian Sonoma has seen a handful of splashy, big hotel openings that make the area feel like it’s headed in the same way as ritzy neighboring Napa. Dawn Ranch is not one of those openings—in the best, most magical way possible. The cabins, cottages, and glamping-style tents (87 keys all in) are spread out across the retreat’s 22 riverside acres punctuated by ancient giant redwoods, grassy meadows, and a century-old apple orchard. From the minute you step on site, there’s a clear invitation to slow down and take in the surrounding nature. The check-in area is low-key and more outdoor than indoor, with a chalkboard that highlights the week’s activities—morning yoga or meditation, an origami workshop, stargazing in the orchard, or live music at the band shell. The front desk can kit you out with picnic blankets, sketchbooks, and binoculars, and there are acoustic Fender guitars available for campfire sing-alongs. There are quiet places—a bench in the sweet kitchen garden, a picnic table under the shade of a cedar—that beckon for guests to stop and stay put for a moment. While the decor and design is very contemporary, there’s this lovely throwback-to-simpler-times feel (and no phones or TVs in the room help keep this vibe going). Dawn Ranch is the rare property that makes it easy to relax, truly befitting its idyllic setting. From $299. —Rebecca Misner

The Fifth Avenue Hotel — New York City Arrow

Modern master Martin Brudnizki’s latest riot of colors, patterns, and curiosities is perhaps his most impeccably orchestrated yet. The vaulted lobby is dressed up in ornate wall panels; corridors are bedecked in vivid wallpapers; rooms are filled with painted screens and pagoda-style lamps that are an ode to the travels of hotel owner Alex Ohebshalom. A go-for-broke assemblage of art, from old-world oils to modern photography, greets you around every corner. It’s the bold palette Brudnizki is known for, a dreamlike pastiche that would have been chaos in the hands of a less practiced hand. Just as adept is the hospitality, which extends from the ready-to-please butler service on every floor to extra touches like the candle that’s slipped into your room after you’ve complimented the scent in the lobby, a martini cart that appears at your door when you need a nightcap, and the warm welcome you’ll get when you return. And you will return, even if just for a perfect Negroni at the hotel’s Portrait Bar or an extravagant dish from Café Carmellini —but most of all, for the chance to wake up in a giant cabinet of curiosities in the heart of New York’s NoMad district. From $895. —Arati Menon

Fontainebleau Las Vegas Arrow

Saying that Fontainebleau is the longest-awaited of any Las Vegas property is no hyperbole: In fact, the 729-foot-high tower (the tallest hotel in Las Vegas) was topped out in 2008 but sat vacant through several ownership changes before Jeffrey Soffer’s Fontainbleau Resorts reclaimed it in 2021—and unveiled the final product in one of the most star-studded and lavish parties in Las Vegas history at the end of 2023. The hotel is a soaring tribute to the original architect of its iconic Miami Beach sister property, Morris Lapidus, complete with a massive oval lobby, monolithic bow-tie-shaped porte cochere, and other midcentury modern glam details. The 67-story Fontainebleau (now the tallest hotel in Vegas) features 3,644 rooms in several categories that afford incredible views of either the mountains or the Strip from floor-to-ceiling windows. There are some truly new-to-Vegas experiences on the dining front: Numbering among the 36 restaurants and lounges are Mother Wolf, which doles out Roman pizza and hand-cut pasta; and the witty Washing Potato, serving up dim sum and street food. The clever Reboot Lounge offers everything from a signature foot massage to compression therapy for legs (great for recovering from a long flight). Fontainebleau takes all the best Las Vegas amenities, adds a bit of Miami glamour, and supersizes everything on a massive stage. From $300. —Emily Gordon

Jessica Puckett

María Casbas

CNT Editors

The Global Ambassador — Phoenix, Arizona Arrow

Phoenix has its fair share of easy-to-categorize hotels, from rambling retreats for families to Old Town Scottsdale party spots seemingly custom-made for bachelorette blowouts. But a chic, cosmopolitan hotel? A property that’s a legitimately cool day-and-night destination for locals? Absolutely nonexistent in the Valley of the Sun—until the arrival of the Global Ambassador. At first blush, you feel more like you’ve touched down somewhere in Europe: Peek outside at the sweet pool with its pink-striped chaise lounge and orange-with-white-piping sun umbrellas, and you’ll swear you’re on the Amalfi Coast. Despite the abundant modern touches (and complete lack of southwest design aesthetic), however, the backdrop of the magnificent Camelback Mountain will remind you exactly where you are. The overall palette in the 141 guest rooms and suites is soft beiges and whites, with many different textural delights—and there’s good framed art everywhere. Of the five food and drink venues, rooftop restaurant Théa is the crown jewel, thanks to a Mediterranean-inspired dinner menu and 360-degree views of Camelback at sunset. The cutting-edge spa and fitness offerings nicely round out this stylish, sophisticated hotel—one that feels totally transportive yet exactly right for this fast-changing desert city. From $350. —Rebecca Misner

Hotel Bardo — Savannah, Georgia Arrow

Stylish Hotel Bardo sits inside the 1888-built Forsyth Mansion, looking out onto Savannah ’s largest and oldest public park. Like all homes in the city, it has history—throughout its life, the building has housed several families, functioned as a funeral home, and served as a three-star hotel, the Mansion of Forsyth Park, until 2022. That’s when the team at New York–based Left Lane stepped in to refresh and rebrand the space, unveiling the new Bardo in February 2024. While the iconic brick exterior of the two main buildings is largely unchanged, a second white-brick building housing 20 suites is now attached to the back—and a shimmering pool and “carriage house” for workout classes and events have been carved out of what was once just a parking lot (talk about an upgrade). The accommodations hit everything on your bingo card for a stylish hotel room in 2024—think brass light fixtures, rattan wardrobes, and a bevy of high-end bathroom supplies. On the dining front, Saint Bibiana takes its cues from some of the city’s restaurants of the moment—instead of staying classic with Lowcountry staples, they do shareable plates that come out as they’re ready, with flavors rooted in “coastal Italian” cuisine. The spa menu, meanwhile, has been specially designed by Left Lane—expect cutting-edge skin treatments paired with wine and decadent snacks. Pro tip: When coming and going from neighborhood jaunts, be sure to chat with the doormen for an introductory course in Southern charm. From $348. —Megan Spurrell

Kona Village, a Rosewood Resort — Kona, Hawaii Arrow

Originally opened in 1965, Kona Village was an early “if you know you know” type of place, prized for its location and laid-back vibe. After a tsunami struck in 2011 and destroyed much of the original structure, the legendary resort sat in ruins until global real estate investment company Kennedy Wilson and Rosewood Hotels & Resorts partnered to reimagine what once was—and they’ve managed to thread the tricky needle between honoring and acknowledging the past while looking to the future. Some of the 150 free-standing bungalows are right on the beach, others look out over the resort’s natural lagoon, and many have expansive private lanais or patios. The decor scheme is a riot of texture—carved wood, woven palm, wicker—and layered colors, mostly neutrals with pops of ocean blue here and there. The Asaya spa, meanwhile, is one of the most visually stunning spaces on grounds: It’s built into the lava flow and has views of the Hualalai volcano off in the distance. All in all, this new iteration of Kona Village ticks every last box. The design is stellar and channels the location beautifully, the service is warm and professional, the beach and the natural setting cannot be topped, and perhaps most importantly—and hardest to pull off—the vibe is just so good. It’s the platonic ideal of the “Hawaiian hotel.” Or, more simply put: Close your eyes and imagine the dreamiest Hawaiian getaway possible. Now open them. From $1,800. —Rebecca Misner

The Georgian — Santa Monica, California Arrow

This iconic, sky-blue Art Deco hotel along beach-adjacent Ocean Avenue has been returned to its former grandeur thanks to an overhaul by BLVD Hospitality (the group also behind Downtown LA’s Soho Warehouse and Hoxton Hotel). After nearly a century—the last half of which was a steady decline—the 1930s property is, once again, a design lover’s paradise, with a mix of Art Deco and Old Havana decor, a heavy dose of jet-set photography, and a dash of Wes Anderson (including the bellhop dressed in a vintage-style, powder blue uniform). You’ll feel the retro-luxe-meets-whimsical vibes as soon as you step into the opulent lobby, with its original arched ceilings and curved staircase intact, drenched in colorful velvet furnishings—plus fun relics like rotary phones and manual typewriters—all centered around a horseshoe bar of imported jade green quartzite that attracts both travelers and locals with Italian-inspired cocktails. Rooms are equally stylish and cheeky, with art-covered walls, gold finishes, and curvy custom-made headboards. Suites, meanwhile, come replete with ocean views, record players, and built-in bars, where you can order up a Champagne or a dessert cart with the literal press of a button. From $700. —Lizbeth Scordo