The 2025 Matador Network Travel Awards
Every year, the Matador Network team and our contributors fan out to small towns, big cities, and wild stretches of coast and mountains around the world. In 2025, we saw Africa’s Big 5 on foot, went deep into the newest national park in the United States, explored an abandoned wellness town in the country of Georgia, and drove France’s tastiest road trip.
All of that on-the-ground travel shows up in the thousand-plus travel stories we published in 2025. Once a year, in the places and airlines we choose to honor as the best of the year.
Our reporting has taken us from regenerative coastal projects and high-alpine trail systems to hot springs towns, digital-nomad hubs, and wildlife corridors where conservation work is changing what responsible tourism looks like. At the same time, we’ve been listening closely to our audience about where they’re actually planning to go next — and why.
All of this makes narrowing down the winners of the Matador Network Travel Awards an annual challenge. Nominations are gathered from across the Matador Network team in six categories: Sustainable Destination, Adventure Destination, Wellness Destination, Next Big Destination, Best Airline, and, new for this year, Best Wildlife Destination. Each nomination is considered by its accessibility, range and quality of experiences, sustainability and stewardship, value for travelers, overall travel impact, and more.
We also turned the decision-making over to our readers. The Matador Network Readers’ Choice Awards run in the same six categories, with a slate of nominations drawn from our editors plus a write-in option for what we missed. Votes from a poll sent to our 300,000-plus newsletter subscribers were collected over the course of a month, and the results once again show how accurately Matador readers track what’s next in travel.
The year ahead will bring new flights, new trails, and new ways of seeing familiar places. Taken together, this year’s team selections and Readers’ Choice winners are a dream list and a practical roadmap for where to go, and how to travel, in the years to come.