Oh, the places you'll go (to relax from work) BY JEREMY WAYNE
“Do you know where you’re going to?” Diana Ross asked in the haunting theme song from the 1975 movie “Mahogany.” I don’t want to be glib – Ross’s film character, Tracy Chambers, was considering far more profound existential questions in the poignant lyric than her next vacation abroad – but following a Covid-ravaged 16 months, it’s certainly a question on many people’s lips.
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Where is it safe to go? When will we know? When should we book? So many questions and, for each one, a dozen or more answers. So, to glean the best intel on the subject, I turned to some of the savviest people in the industry. While the travel experts at Scott Dunn USA, the bespoke, high-end travel agent and tour operator, sensibly say they are not encouraging clients to travel beyond their comfort level, they can provide all the resources needed and all the current facts for their clients to travel responsibly. Indeed, they are booking vacations for increasingly confident travelers in a growing number of countries, but Mexico, Costa Rica and the Caribbean are among the most popular. The relative proximity of these destinations, coupled with their safety protocols and encouraging Covid statistics, makes them especially appealing to travelers from the United States — something I heard repeatedly from a number of agents. But Scott Dunn is also taking a longer view, with “big-ticket, bucket-list trips” that readers should have on their radar for travel in 2022. With capacity constraints on popular buck-
et-list destinations — number quotas in Bhutan and Machu Picchu, say, or gorilla trekking in Rwanda — and with a likely run on capacity once the pandemic is well and truly in retreat — they are advising very early booking, in some cases well over a year ahead. The agency has prepared a Scott Dunn “timetable” of where to book and when, and it includes making reservations now for cherry blossom season in Japan next spring; between July and October this year for Kenya’s Great Wildebeest Migration in summer 2022; and from November through next March for a penguin-spotting trip to Antarctica in the winter of
