Intrepid Travel, a B-Corp that offers a wide range of global tours, has just released its 2027 Not Hot List, which showcases lesser-visited destinations throughout the world. We sat down with CEO James Thornton to find out what’s new and different this year—and what surprised even him.
What is the Not Hot List?
Since the first one came out in 2018, the point of Intrepid’s annual Not Hot List has been to spotlight and support lesser-traveled destinations that are, as the company puts in, “ready for—and deserving of—more visitors, where tourism can create meaningful change for local communities.”
To make its recommendations, Intrepid gathers insights from its own operations staff in 35 offices around the world, plus tourism boards and local guides. The company combines that on-the-ground insight with trend forecasting data from research firm Globetrender, such as information on international arrival numbers, air connectivity, accommodations, and a region’s tourism economics.
The destinations are chosen based on three key criteria, per an Intrepid release: “(1) being less-visited, with fewer visitors than comparable places; (2) demonstrating tourism readiness, with infrastructure and capacity to support more tourists; and (3) new initiatives, improved connectivity, major events, launches or infrastructure developments that give travelers a compelling reason to visit in 2027.”
Mainstream countries make the list
To CEO James Thornton, one of the biggest surprises on the 2027 list was Whitehorse, in Canada’s Yukon Province.
“I think it’s good to see countries that are considered relatively mainstream—Canada, for example,” he said. “I think that often people expect it to be a country they’ve never thought of or heard of, but you can have mainstream countries—just unexplored parts of mainstream countries.” He pointed out that of the more than 20 million international visitors who traveled to Canada in 2025, only about 700,000 of them went to Yukon—or just 3.5 percent.
He called out a similar selection on last year’s list: the island of Vis in Croatia, an alternative to heavily touristed Hvar and Dubrovnik. “You don’t want to send so many people there that you then have all these massive hotels being built and chain hotels going,” he said, “but equally you want to get that dispersal of income and experience, both for a customer to have a great time, but also for local communities to benefit from it.”
Of course, there’s the concern that by spotlighting less-traveled places, it could trigger overtourism there. “That’s always the question,” Thornton said. “By trying to placate overtourism by going to undertouristed areas, do you then just shift people to another place? But I feel that for destinations that we’ve had on our list in previous years, we see exceptional growth around them, but it’s of such a small base. So even if we get 170 percent growth to Kyrgyzstan, that means I’ve gone from taking a few hundred customers to maybe a couple of thousand. So in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really compete with the 25,000 people we carry to Morocco.”
With that potential growth in mind, infrastructure readiness is a big factor for inclusion, and Thornton said the Intrepid team is paying attention to that year-round, and in fact has already started discussing next year’s up-and-coming destinations. “It’s about what trends are we seeing, what’s coming up in the market, which countries are starting to have the infrastructure that could enable tourism to come, because there’s no point in us putting something on the Not Hot List when you physically can’t get there or the community can’t welcome you.”
Related: Intrepid Travel Works to Change the Way We See the World
Mestia, Georgia, is in the UNESCO-recognized Upper Svaneti region of the Caucasus and is known for its medieval-type village and tower houses.
Photo by Tuul and Bruno Morandi
In a complex world, focusing on destinations closer to home
While the Not Hot List is focused on opening up the world, the team at Intrepid is actually seeing that the options for travel are becoming more limited.
“One of the trends Intrepid is focusing on a lot is closer-to-home travel,” Thornton said, “and we’ve seen in the last six years that lots of our trips have been disrupted because people can’t get to the places they want to get to traditionally—first because of the pandemic and second in the last few months because of the situation in the Middle East. If you’re in Australia and 52 of all international flights go through the three Middle Eastern hubs, suddenly half of your international travel access has been cut off. So we’re building more and more itineraries for domestic travel or close to home travel [from our major markets]. That’s one of our key focuses.” The impact of that world shift (and Intrepid’s own focus) shows up on the Not Hot List by having off-the-beaten path spots in such familiar places as Canada, Sweden, and Greece.
In addition to geopolitics, Thornton attributes travel shifts to climate change. “In the last week, there was Grand Canyon flooding and the tragedy on the Nepal–Tibet border,” he said. “Both are instances of climate change impacting travel destinations, so we have a responsibility to try and decarbonize. And one of the ways we can decarbonize is to offer experiences to people close to home in their home country and home destination.”
As a result, he said, Intrepid is increasing its tour offerings in and around its main source markets: North America, Europe, and Australia. For example, a few of the company’s latest tours include the 16-day Wild Canada & Alaska and a nine-day trek on the Trans-Caucasian Trail in Georgia.
But the company isn’t limiting itself either, and the list as a whole spans the globe, spotlighting destinations that will be unfamiliar to some travelers alongside under-the-radar spots in more popular countries.
The 2027 Intrepid Not Hot List
- Samburu National Reserve, Kenya
- Mestia, Georgia
- Northern Highlands, Jordan
- Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada
- Alonnisos, Greece
- Dili, Timor-Leste
- Pekoe Trail, Sri Lanka
- Liepāja, Latvia
- Carretera Austral, Chile
- Dalsland, Sweden
