Best Places to Visit in Summer 2018

Every year, my friends at Allianz Travel Insurance conduct a survey of the most popular destinations for Americans to visit in the summer months.

The way that Allianz calculates these destinations is by reviewing customers’ trips planned from May 28 to Sept 3, 2018 — and each trip is between 5 and 8 days long.

As you can see in more detail via the graph below, the most popular places for this summer domestically are Orlando,  NYC and Las Vegas — all of which are not surprising.  The bottom few in the top 10 are Boston, Ft. Lauderdale, Floridaand San Francisco.

For international destinations, the top 3 are Cancun, Higuey, Dominican Republic and Montego Bay, Jamaica.  I am assuming that many people will visit these destinations via cruise ship (like Carnival), as they are hotspots among cruise lines.   The bottom 3 destinations in the top 10 are San Juan, Puerto Rico (surprising, considering the recent trauma that just hit the island), Paris, France and Turks & Caicos.  I’ve been dying to go to T&C for a long, long time — so maybe I will finally make it out this summer!

Below is the complete list of the top 10 international destinations for American travelers this summer.

Paris and London are the only two destinations outside of the Americans, and they are (of course) the two most popular destinations in Europe.  No surprises there.

I’m happy to see islands in the southern Caribbean included in this list, such as Aruba, because they are the most stunning places to visit in the region (in my humble opinion).  For next year, I’d like to see Colombia make the list (another amazing country that is becoming quite popular for Americans to visit these days).

In regards to Mexico, there are travel warnings all over the places for Americans to be careful going (and especially after another family was just found killed while on vacation) — but places like Cancun, where I’ve been twice, are much safer than other regions.

As for my personal recommendations for places to visit in summer, 2018 — I would say Japan, Tajikistan and Prague — all are fascinating places that will be in peak season from May – September.

*Methodology: The data of U.S. travelers’ 2018 summer travel plans was gathered by analyzing the number of travelers that went through the online booking process of airfare and package paths for partners offering Allianz Global Assistance travel to generate itineraries for roundtrip flights departing from US airports during 5/28/2018 – 9/3/2018 for trips between 5-8 days in length.