This is a story from the record books. When Conde Nast Traveller published its list of the 20 best holiday destinations for 2020 in December 2019, the country placed at number one was Pakistan, ranked the best holiday destination for 2020 ahead of destinations on four other continents.
The magazine’s list was deliberately global, mixing famous names with places its editors thought the world was about to discover. Plymouth in the United Kingdom came second, followed by Kyrgyzstan in third and Armenia in fourth, with Salvador in Brazil fifth. Kangaroo Island in Australia, Galway in Ireland and the island of Siargao in the Philippines followed, Paris came ninth, and Kyoto in Japan closed the list at number twenty. Pakistan sat above all of them, a sentence that would have been hard to imagine in travel media a decade earlier.
Why the Magazine Put Pakistan First
Conde Nast Traveller pointed its readers to a country of extremes: some of the highest mountains on Earth, including five of the world’s fourteen eight-thousand-metre peaks, ancient cities, Mughal architecture and food scenes from Lahore to Karachi. Its coverage framed Pakistan as a must-visit for adventure travellers in particular, praising improved security and a government push to open the country up, including a new e-visa system and visa on arrival for many nationalities. In the same list coverage, Pakistan was also placed third in the world for adventure travel potential, a separate distinction from the same editors, and worth keeping separate from the headline ranking.
Tour operators who knew the country were not surprised. Jonny Bealby, founder of the adventure travel company Wild Frontiers, was quoted in coverage of the list crediting the security improvements and the official welcome for tourists, after years in which Pakistan’s mountains had been largely the preserve of expedition climbers and the most determined independent travellers.
The Adventure Angle
The same editors who placed Pakistan first overall also ranked it third in the world for adventure travel potential, and it is easy to see why the two judgements travelled together. This is the country of K2, the second highest mountain on Earth, of the Baltoro Glacier trek, of rafting rivers running off the Karakoram, of jeep tracks to the Deosai Plains and the Fairy Meadows beneath Nanga Parbat. Adventure tourism depends on exactly what Pakistan was newly able to offer in 2019: access, permits that could be applied for online, and a security picture calm enough for insurers and tour companies to return.
At home, the ranking was received as a national pat on the back. It led television bulletins and newspaper front pages, the government of the day welcomed it publicly, and the then prime minister, Imran Khan, whose administration had made tourism promotion a stated priority, shared the news with his followers. For an industry that had spent years apologising for headlines it did not write, the list offered a different headline entirely.
Pakistan had been climbing such lists for two years by then. In 2018, the British Backpacker Society had named Pakistan the world’s top adventure travel destination, describing it as one of the friendliest countries on Earth. Conde Nast Traveller’s editors, choosing for a far larger and more mainstream readership, reached a similar conclusion a year later, and for the same reasons: mountains, welcome and value for money that few competing destinations could match.
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A high mountain valley in Gilgit-Baltistan, among the northern landscapes the magazine pointed its readers towards
Photo: Saleha22, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Why the Best Holiday Destination for 2020 Tag Mattered
The timing mattered. The list arrived weeks after the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s October 2019 tour had put Pakistan’s northern scenery on front pages around the world, and in the same year that Forbes had named Pakistan among the coolest places to visit. For a tourism industry rebuilding after a difficult decade, the title of best holiday destination for 2020 was the strongest headline imaginable, and officials, airlines and hotels quoted it for years afterwards.
Then came the cruel twist. Within weeks of the list’s year beginning, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down global travel almost completely, and Pakistan’s moment at the top of the world’s holiday lists collided with closed borders and grounded planes. The ranking did not bring the flood of visitors it promised in 2020 itself. What it did instead was change the starting point for the recovery: when travel resumed, Pakistan was no longer a country travel editors had to explain, but one they had already endorsed.
It is worth being precise about what the honour was: one magazine’s editorial pick for one year, not a permanent crown. The original Conde Nast Traveller page no longer loads today (we checked before publishing this article), but the full list survives in reprints credited to the magazine and in the coverage it generated at the time, and the ranking remains a genuine milestone in how the world’s travel media began to see Pakistan again.
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Record-breaking Month for Tourism in KPK with Over 890,000 Visitors!
What Travellers Were Being Pointed To
The draw was, and remains, variety inside a single trip: the Hunza and Skardu valleys beneath the Karakoram giants, the walled city and food streets of Lahore, the bazaars of Peshawar, the Indus delta and the coastline from Karachi to Gwadar, Thar desert towns, Sufi shrines, and some of the oldest civilisations on Earth at Mohenjo-daro and Taxila. Few countries can offer an eight-thousand-metre peak and a working ancient port city in the same fortnight.
Pakistan’s tourism story has kept moving since 2020, with new festivals, better roads to the north and a growing domestic travel culture leading the way. Our Beautiful Pakistan page collects guides and stories from across the country, and this ranking belongs in our Pakistan World Rankings and Records collection, where the record books are kept honestly: celebrated, and always labelled with their year. The best holiday destination for 2020 title is a 2019 judgement about a 2020 list, and it is remembered here exactly as that.
Sources
- The full list reprinted by Philstar, credited to Conde Nast Traveler
- ARY News
- Zameen Blog
- Featured image: The Hunza Valley seen from Eagle’s Nest, high above the Karakoram Highway in Gilgit-Baltistan (Alllexxxis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
- In-body image: A high mountain valley in Gilgit-Baltistan, northern Pakistan (Saleha22, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Umar Farooq is the founder and editor of Good News Pakistan. An engineer by profession and a writer by passion, he started the site in December 2022 to share good news from Pakistan, and has since written and edited more than 200 articles about its people, sports, science, business and world records. He believes the story of Pakistan is bigger than its headlines, and that good news, told honestly, is worth telling every day.