Tripexpert is excited to announce the winners of the 2021 Experts’ Choice Awards. This year, the award will be received by 5,000 hotels, restaurants and attractions in 126 countries. These are, quite simply, the best of the best places to stay, eat and visit in 2021, according to professional travel reviewers.
What’s new this year
The emergence of COVID-19 halted travelers in their tracks. Over 18 months, as the world went into lockdown after lockdown, it became clear that travel would have to be reinvented for a post-pandemic world. Throughout, businesses have shown amazing resilience and creative thinking. Michelin-starred restaurants became takeaways. Hotels took the opportunity to renovate or extend. Museums, galleries and other attractions went digital and innovated to engage visitors stuck at home.
Because of the pandemic, we decided against awarding Experts’ Choice in 2020. Instead, we used the time to overhaul the site, which is now faster and easier to use. We also improved our coverage of remote destinations that have been especially popular with travelers in the last year, such as national parks and nature reserves.
About this year’s winners
Many of our Experts’ Choice winners are notable for how they responded to the pandemic. In the restaurant category, the three Michelin-starred 11 Madison Park in New York was not above designing meal kits so diners could recreate their gourmet experience in their own homes. The Crane Resort in Barbados, another Experts’ Choice winner, is allowing guests who test positive for coronavirus to self isolate at the resort for free, rather than paying for a government hotel.
Other winners include the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, an outstanding museum which recently made its entire permanent collection of 2000-plus artefacts available online, and Astrid & Gaston, a pioneering restaurant which helped put Lima on the tourism map.
The New Acropolis Museum in Athens
Despite the hardships involved in opening new businesses in the past 18 months, our list of winners includes an impressive 849 places that have not previously received the award.
As in previous years, Europe and the Americas performed very strongly; this year, it’s a virtual tie between the two continents in terms of total number of winners (about 1,900 each). They are followed by Asia (about 900 winners) and Africa and Oceania (about 250 winners each).
Selection criteria
Tripexpert is unique in relying exclusively on professional reviews in determining our award winners. Every place we cover has a Tripexpert Score — the result of aggregating reviews from travel guides, magazines, newspapers and blogs. Our sources include publications like Travel + Leisure, Frommer’s, and The New York Times.
Experts’ Choice is awarded to the highest rated places in each destination. In general, no more than 2% of businesses receive the award, making it a distinctive honor.
Next steps
If you’re a winner, we’ll send you an email. You can use our collection of Experts’ Choice badges on your website to show that you are top-rated by experts. Additional resources are available on our Experts’ Choice page, and we’re happy to help you with media outreach — please contact Chris Blume with any queries you may have.
If you’re a traveler, keep an eye out for Experts’ Choice badges on the pages of winning venues on Tripexpert.com and around the internet when you’re planning your next trip. You can also look for winners on our Experts’ Choice page.
