The Inspire List: Bucket List Experiences for 2026
- Andrew C.
- 5 hours ago
- 14 min read
2026 is already here, and with it, a noticeable shift in how and why we travel.
The urgency to go everywhere has softened. The appetite for surface-level novelty has thinned. In its place, a more deliberate instinct has emerged. This year, travel is no longer about checking in places. It is about discernment.
The Inspire List for 2026 was shaped by this understanding. Rather than asking what is new or most visible, we asked a different question: what experiences feel essential at this moment in time? The answers led us across continents and disciplines: rail, sea, wilderness, and the table, but always back to the same principle. The journeys worth taking now are those that deepen perspective, slow the internal clock, and reward attention.
Over months of research, conversations, and first-hand experiences, one pattern became impossible to ignore. South America has moved decisively to the center of global curiosity, not as a trend, and not as an escape, but as a region where depth still outweighs design, where landscape sets the rhythm, and where culture remains inseparable from land. Patagonia, the Amazon, and the southern oceans do not accommodate haste. They ask for presence, patience, and humility, and that is precisely why they matter now.
Rail travel returns not as nostalgia, but as narrative. Trains become moving frames through culture and geography, where time itself becomes part of the story. At sea, a new generation of yachts and expedition vessels redefines movement through water, prioritizing access, clarity, and restraint over scale. In gastronomy, the draw is no longer the newest opening, but the rare opportunity to step inside living legacies, to witness how ideas evolve, endure, and are passed forward.
Even the world’s most recognizable stages, from Monaco to the Mediterranean, reveal a different magnetism when experienced from within rather than observed from afar. When access replaces proximity, familiar places begin to feel effortlessly transformed.
What unites every experience on this list is not extravagance, nor exclusivity for its own sake. It is alignment between place and purpose, timing, and intent. These journeys feel right for 2026 because they respond to a broader recalibration: a world choosing to move more thoughtfully, consume more selectively, and connect more meaningfully.
The List is a signal to travel with greater awareness, to choose depth over volume, and to recognize that the journeys worth taking now may be fewer, but far more consequential. We can also connect and assist you in planning and booking these once-in-a-lifetime journeys.
Welcome to The Inspire List: Bucket List Experiences for 2026.
Private Patagonia, Living the Landscape at Its Own Pace
According to VM Elite, our local partner in South America, Patagonia reveals its full power when experienced through places that understand both scale and restraint, and this privately curated journey across Argentina and Chile is defined by two such addresses: Awasi Patagonia and Eleven Río Palena Lodge. At Awasi, set deep within private reserves near Torres del Paine, exploration unfolds entirely on your own terms, one villa per party, a dedicated private guide and vehicle, and days shaped by instinct rather than itinerary, moving through glacial valleys, lenga forests, and windswept plains beneath the silhouettes of Fitz Roy and the Paine Massif. Crossing into Chile’s remote Palena Valley,
Eleven Río Palena Lodge introduces a more kinetic expression of Patagonia, where heli-access opens untouched rivers, backcountry trails, and vast Andean terrain for fly fishing, hiking, horseback riding, and wilderness immersion at a scale few ever reach. Here, days are expansive and physical, matched by refined lodge living, fireside evenings, and cuisine shaped by the rhythms of the land. Together, Awasi and Eleven form a rare continuum, one defined by privacy, freedom, and precision, offering a Patagonia that is not observed from a distance, but lived fully, deeply, and personally.
Andean Explorer: A High-Altitude Passage Through Peru’s Living Heritage
The Andean Explorer by Belmond offers one of the most immersive ways to experience Peru, not by rushing between landmarks, but by allowing the landscape, history, and altitude to unfold gradually. This two-night, three-day journey traces a powerful arc through the southern Andes, beginning in Cusco and ascending toward the vast, luminous plateau surrounding Lake Titicaca, climbing to over 4,100 metres above sea level. It is travel shaped by rhythm rather than speed, where the act of moving becomes part of the experience itself.
Days are layered with moments that connect ancient culture to present-day practice. Before reaching Puno, the journey includes encounters with Incan archaeological sites and a visit to the Sumbay Caves, where pre-Columbian rock art still watches over the volcanic landscape of Arequipa. Along the route, the open-air Observation Deck becomes a moving vantage point onto Peru’s high plains, where herds of alpacas and vicuñas drift across wide horizons under constantly shifting light.
At Lake Titicaca, one of South America’s most sacred bodies of water, the experience deepens. Guests disembark for a newly introduced wellness ritual on Colla Beach, where lunch is paired with a traditional bath-healing practice rooted in Andean belief systems. The ceremony draws on the restorative qualities long associated with the lake, offering a moment of pause and reflection within a setting that has sustained communities for centuries.
Life onboard mirrors the same sense of considered balance. Cabins range from cleverly designed bunk rooms to elegant suites that can be connected for families or longer stays. The Picaflor Spa Car provides a quieter counterpoint to the day’s excursions, offering massages and treatments as the Andes pass slowly outside the windows. Dining draws on regional ingredients and Andean culinary traditions, framed by ever-changing scenery.
The Andean Explorer earns its place on The Inspire List because it treats Peru as a living continuum of land, culture, and altitude. It is a journey that honors scale without overwhelming, tradition without nostalgia, and luxury without excess.
Four Seasons Yachts — A New Way to Live the Mediterranean
There are moments when a new travel format simply resets expectations. Four Seasons Yachts enters the Mediterranean not as a cruise concept, but as a fully articulated lifestyle at sea, one that feels closer to a private residence than a vessel.
Launching its inaugural Mediterranean season in 2026, the yacht reimagines movement through the region as a sequence of lived places rather than ports to be ticked off. Itineraries unfold along the French and Italian Rivieras, the Balearics, the Adriatic, and the Greek isles with a pace that allows for mornings at anchor, long lunches ashore, and returns timed to golden-hour light. Routes are designed to linger where the Mediterranean feels most itself, between historic harbors, quiet coves, and working marinas, shifting the emphasis from distance covered to time well spent.
Life onboard reflects the Four Seasons approach at its most residential. All-suite accommodations open onto expansive terraces, erasing the boundary between interior calm and open water. Materials, proportions, and sightlines are composed for ease rather than display, with spaces that encourage privacy, conversation, and unhurried routines. Wellness and dining follow the same logic: considered, refined, and attuned to place, with menus shaped by the regions being sailed and spa rituals designed for rhythm rather than recovery.
One of the most distinctive chapters is the Marina Day experience, an invitation to remain docked and inhabit a destination fully. Instead of departing at dusk, the yacht becomes a floating extension of the harbor, allowing guests to step seamlessly between sea and city, return for a swim or a late aperitivo, and experience the cadence of Mediterranean life from morning through night.
Four Seasons Yachts earns its place on The Inspire List 2026 for the clarity of its vision. This is the Mediterranean experienced as a continuum: architecture, water, cuisine, and time align to create a way of travel that feels both deeply familiar and entirely new. It offers a refined alternative to both superyacht charter and traditional cruising, shaped for those who value presence over pace and elegance over excess.
Orient Express Italy — La Dolce Vita in Motion
Italy has always understood the poetry of arrival. With Orient Express, that poetry unfolds across three interconnected chapters: the rebirth of the Orient Express La Minerva Hotel in Roma, the private La Dolce Vita Lounge experience at Roma Ostiense Station, and the journey itself aboard La Dolce Vita Orient Express, a modern train conceived as a moving portrait of Italian culture.
The experience begins in Rome, at the newly restored Orient Express La Minerva, where classical geometry, Roman stone, and contemporary Italian design establish a sense of measured elegance. From here, guests transition seamlessly to the Orient Express Lounge Roma Termini, a calm, curated threshold away from the public station, an edited space where time slows, luggage disappears, and anticipation quietly builds.
Aboard La Dolce Vita, Italy reveals itself through rhythm rather than distance. The train’s interiors draw from the golden age of Italian design, polished woods, lacquered surfaces, warm metals, and graphic textiles, reinterpreted with modern restraint. Cabins and suites feel intimate and architectural, dining takes place as a celebration of regional flavors, and communal spaces invite conversation as landscapes shift beyond panoramic windows.
The itineraries themselves are composed as cultural passages rather than linear routes. Journeys trace Italy’s most evocative geographies, from Rome north toward Florence and Venice, through the vineyards and historic towns of Tuscany and Piedmont, along the Ligurian coast toward Portofino, and south through Basilicata and Puglia, where white-stone villages and olive groves unfold at a slower Mediterranean pace. Other routes extend toward Sicily, pairing rail travel with coastal atmospheres and deep-rooted regional traditions. Each itinerary balances time aboard the train with curated off-train moments, allowing Italy to be experienced as a continuum of landscapes, architecture, cuisine, and lived culture.
What places this journey firmly on The Inspire List 2026 is the coherence of the vision. Orient Express has not created a single experience, but a complete ecosystem, hotel, lounge, train, and destination, working in harmony, allowing travelers to experience Italy as a sequence of atmospheres, gestures, and encounters. It offers a contemporary interpretation of la dolce vita that feels lived-in, polished, and distinctly Italian.
Pure Amazon — Into the River’s Inner Life
The Amazon moves with its own intelligence. Its rhythms are measured not in distance, but in light, water levels, sound, and seasonal shift. Pure Amazon, the newest river vessel from Abercrombie & Kent’s Sanctuary collection, engages with this cadence through presence rather than spectacle, offering an experience shaped by patience, proximity, and deep ecological access.
Designed for just 22 guests, the vessel navigates three-, four-, and seven-night journeys through Peru’s Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. The scale is intentionally intimate, allowing refined design, expert naturalist guidance, and meaningful exploration to coexist without dilution. Every detail feels calibrated to support observation, learning, and stillness.
Pure Amazon reads more like a floating boutique lodge than a conventional river ship. Its 12 suites and cabins open onto uninterrupted views of river and rainforest, creating a constant dialogue between interior calm and the world beyond the glass. Shared spaces, including a spa, observation decks, and an open-air hot tub, invite reflection between excursions, with architecture that remains deliberately secondary to the landscape.
The itineraries form the true core of the journey. Departing from Iquitos and moving upriver through Nauta, days unfold across flooded forests, oxbow lakes, and narrow tributaries deep within the reserve. Early-morning and twilight skiff explorations track pink river dolphins, macaws, caimans, and howler monkeys, while guided walks reveal medicinal plants, canopy systems, and the layered intelligence of the forest floor. Kayaking along ink-dark waterways and visits to remote river communities further ground the experience in lived context. Seasonal shifts subtly reshape each voyage, rewarding repeat travelers with new perspectives on the same terrain.
Dining aboard Pure Amazon reflects the same attentiveness. Menus draw from Peruvian and Amazonian ingredients, composed with restraint and clarity, accompanied by regional wines and thoughtful pairings. Evenings often gather guests for wildlife briefings, cultural conversations, and quiet storytelling beneath the open sky, extending the day’s discoveries rather than closing them.
Pure Amazon earns its place on The Inspire List 2026 because it offers a rare form of travel, one defined by immersion, respect, and equilibrium. Design, service, and ecology move in alignment, allowing the Amazon to be encountered from within, as a living system rather than a distant wonder.
Mauro Colagreco's Mirazur × Ferran Adrià: Twenty Years, One Curated Table
At the meeting point of sea, mountains, and gardens in Menton, Mirazur reaches a rare milestone: twenty years of continuous evolution shaped by nature, curiosity, and conviction. To mark this anniversary, Mauro Colagreco has chosen an unprecedented way of looking back, by inviting another mind to read, interpret, and curate his life’s work. The result is a singular gastronomic moment: a celebratory menu curated by Ferran Adrià, the chef who redefined modern cuisine and reshaped how the world understands creativity at the table.
Rather than a collaboration in the traditional sense, this anniversary unfolds as a curated retrospective. Adrià steps into the role of gastronomic curator, studying two decades of Mirazur’s recipes, techniques, and transformations with analytical clarity and deep affection. The menu, served throughout April 2026, traces the restaurant’s journey from its early expressions to its present-day philosophy, rooted in permaculture, biodiversity, and circular gastronomy, while honoring the great legacies of French haute cuisine that continue to inform Colagreco’s vision.
This encounter brings together two parallel philosophies. Colagreco’s cuisine, shaped by the rhythms of his gardens and a profound respect for nature’s cycles, meets Adrià’s lifelong dedication to research, structure, and knowledge-sharing—values forged during the era of elBulli and carried forward through elBullifoundation. The menu becomes a living archive: iconic dishes revisited, techniques examined, ingredients contextualised, and ideas placed within a broader cultural and historical frame.
Executed daily by the Mirazur team, the experience invites diners into a rare form of reflection, one that treats gastronomy as language, memory, and future possibility. Contributions made in connection with this anniversary support elBullifoundation, extending the spirit of the celebration toward the next generation of chefs and thinkers.
This twentieth anniversary stands as an act of transmission, a meeting of two masterminds at the height of their influence, and a reminder that the most enduring forms of luxury are built through patience, generosity, and intellectual thoroughness.
Mirazur’s story continues to be written here, as a living, breathing dialogue between past, present, and what comes next.
Explora Journeys Monaco Grand Prix: Living the Race from the Waterline
Anchored directly in Monaco’s harbor during Grand Prix weekend, Explora Journeys offers one of the most considered vantage points in contemporary travel. From the moment guests step aboard, the cadence of Formula 1 becomes part of daily life on the ship, engines tracing the harbor air by day, Monaco shifting into its nocturnal glow by evening, the circuit threading itself through the city just beyond the decks.
Suites open onto the harbor, terraces frame the race at a distance that feels deliberate, and the ship’s spatial design creates an atmosphere of clarity and flow. The weekend moves forward with ease: mornings shaped by anticipation, afternoons defined by the race, evenings carried by the city’s social current.
Having experienced the Monaco Grand Prix from Explora last year, what remained most striking was the harmony between intensity and composure. Race days carried their full charge, while returning onboard restored balance through space, calm, and thoughtful service. Evenings extended naturally into Monaco itself with private access, curated gatherings, and the comfort of knowing the city remained fully within reach.
Explora Journeys during Monaco Grand Prix weekend functions as a unique living perspective. The ship becomes part of the event’s architecture, allowing the race to be absorbed as a cultural moment shaped by design, movement, hospitality, and timing. For those who understand Monaco as rhythm rather than destination, this experience captures the city at its most precise and alive.
Sailing the Indonesian Archipelago with Dunia Baru, One Horizon at a Time
Indonesia is a country experienced through patience and proximity. Spanning more than 17,000 islands, its most meaningful encounters unfold far from ports, resorts, and fixed schedules, in narrow straits, remote reefs, and island communities where the sea continues to set the rhythm of life. Dunia Baru was created for this scale of exploration: a privately chartered phinisi that functions as a moving field base for discovery.
Each journey follows a singular principle: go where depth still exists. Across Komodo, Alor, Raja Ampat, and the Banda Sea, days are shaped by conditions rather than timetables. Tides, currents, weather systems, and marine movement guide the flow, allowing the experience to respond organically to place. Diving sits at the core of the journey, supported by serious infrastructure and a crew whose familiarity with these waters comes from years of lived navigation rather than seasonal routing. The result is access to sites defined by vitality and complexity, reef systems layered with life, pelagic-rich channels, and underwater topographies that reward patience, precision, and curiosity.
Above the surface, the journey expands outward. Landings take place on islands that remain culturally intact, fishing villages, historic spice routes, volcanic landscapes, and uninhabited shores where time feels suspended. Encounters are quiet and observant, leaving room for quiet and deeper understanding. Meals reflect the region, shaped by what is sourced along the way and shared informally, wherever the day naturally settles.
Dunia Baru’s design mirrors its intent. Handcrafted by Konjo boatbuilders using traditional techniques, the vessel carries the intelligence of Indonesian maritime heritage, translated into a restrained, contemporary form. The scale remains intimate, the atmosphere unprogrammed, and the focus stays firmly on movement, knowledge, and access rather than display.
This is why Dunia Baru belongs on The Inspire List 2026. It represents a way of traveling that privileges expertise over excess, knowledge over performance, and immersion over narrative convenience. In a region often simplified by surface-level itineraries, Dunia Baru offers something increasingly rare: a passage into Indonesia that feels earned, fluid, and deeply local.
Gorilla Forest Lodge, Uganda — At the Threshold of the Wild
Set deep within the ancient canopy of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, Gorilla Forest Lodge in Uganda occupies one of the most consequential landscapes left on Earth. This UNESCO World Heritage Site shelters more than half of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas, and the lodge sits not beside the forest, but fully inside it, at a point where human presence gives way to one of nature’s most profound encounters.
Reopened in 2025 following a complete and environmentally sensitive rebuild, Gorilla Forest Lodge now presents just ten suites, each designed to dissolve quietly into the surrounding greenery. Interiors balance warmth and restraint: natural materials, generous proportions, and deep soaking tubs framed by jungle views offer a sense of restoration after long days in the forest. Gorillas themselves have been known to wander through the lodge grounds, reinforcing the feeling that this is shared territory rather than staged proximity.
Gorilla trekking remains the emotional and experiential core. Guided by expert rangers—many of whom have participated directly in the gorilla habituation process with guests set out into dense, mountainous terrain to meet one of Bwindi’s habituated families. Each visit is limited, intimate, and carefully managed, allowing a full hour in the presence of these extraordinary animals once they are found. Specially designed sedan chairs also make the experience accessible to guests with limited mobility, expanding who can enter the forest and share this moment.
Life at the lodge extends beyond trekking. Evenings gather around the open fire in the indoor-outdoor lounge, where the forest’s sounds carry through the night air. A dedicated spa offers treatments that restore the body after demanding walks, while the Explorer’s Lounge provides context through maps, books, and stories of Bwindi’s ecology and cultures. Dining follows a thoughtful, inclusive rhythm, meals prepared with care, often returning guests from the forest to warmth, conversation, and calm.
Equally integral is the lodge’s relationship with the surrounding communities. Guided visits introduce guests to the Batwa people, tea growers, and local initiatives supported by the lodge, including the Bwindi Community Hospital, nursing school, women’s bicycle enterprise, and clean water programs. These encounters are grounded in continuity, offering insight into how conservation, healthcare, and education intertwine in this region.
Gorilla Forest Lodge earns its place on The Inspire List 2026 as a reminder of travel’s highest potential. Here, the forest sets the pace, the gorillas define the privilege, and luxury is expressed through access, care, and responsibility. Few experiences recalibrate perspective as clearly as standing face to face with a mountain gorilla in its ancestral home, and fewer still do so with the depth, integrity, and grace found in Bwindi.
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