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The protected area starts where the land stops. The whole coastline is a marine park from the high-water mark down, the reef begins a short swim out, and yellow-painted stones along the coast road mark named dive sites you reach by parking, kitting up and wading in. That is much of why Bonaire, a small dry island in the Dutch Caribbean, holds some of the healthiest reefs in the region and a reputation out of proportion to its size. The reputation is paid for, and by more than one bill. Flights arrive from the Netherlands and North America, with regional hops from Aruba and Curaçao, and the island sits south of the usual hurricane track, though not beyond weather. Most people book the room and the vehicle together, because the two work as one system: the dive sites are spread along the coast road with no useful alternative to driving. It is worth comparing flights, rooms and vehicles in one place before fixing anything, since high season fills the trucks as readily as the beds. E...

Trinidad is the busy, industrial, loud one, birthplace of calypso and steelpan and home of the biggest date on the Caribbean travel calendar, where beaches are an afterthought. Tobago is small, green and slow, ringed with reefs and rainforest and the quiet coves Trinidad simply does not have. They share a flag, a government and a currency, and very little else about how a week feels. Book one expecting the other and you will be disappointed by a very good island. Trinidad has the main international airport, with connections from North America and Europe, and Tobago has its own. Entry now begins before you fly: the paper landing card has been replaced by a free online arrival and departure form on the official government portal, filed shortly before travel, which returns codes that immigration and customs scan at both ends. You also need a passport with about six months left and an onward ticket, and while most western nationalities enter visa free, others must apply for an electron...

Nutmeg and mace grow across the hills, cocoa is made into chocolate on the estates where it is grown, and the whole island smells faintly of both. Off the west coast, in the shallow water of Molinere Bay, concrete figures stand in rings on the sand, the first underwater sculpture park of its kind, now doubling as an artificial reef. The bay had been stripped bare by a hurricane years before the first figures went in, and giving marine life a new base to grow on was part of the point. Between the spice and the statues, this is one of the Caribbean's most quietly interesting islands. The airport lies at the southern tip, close to the beach hotels and connected to North America and Europe. Arrivals have been climbing steadily and the island has become one of the region's stronger performers, so the dry winter months and the August carnival fill rooms early. Compare flights and hotels for Grenada at https://destination.chat and note that the sister islands, Carriacou and Petite Mar...

A beach for every day of the year is the line the island has sold for decades, and the coast does oblige, all coves and reefs and pale sand. What the slogan leaves out is that Antigua also keeps a Georgian naval yard that never stopped working. At English Harbour, the dockyard where Nelson served still runs as a marina, the only naval base of its age anywhere still doing the job it was built for, raised out of stone and ship ballast by enslaved labour and listed by UNESCO along with the fortified ridge above it. The island sits in the northern Lesser Antilles, green and rolling where its sister island Barbuda is flat and pale, and the two halves of the appeal, sand and history, are rarely far apart. Reaching it is the easy part. V.C. Bird International Airport sits close to the capital and takes direct services from North America and Europe, which makes this one of the simpler eastern Caribbean islands to reach without a connection, and Nelson's Dockyard is about half an hour ...

Half of it is Dutch and half of it is French, and the line between has been crossed without a checkpoint for centuries. Sint Maarten in the south is the busier side, built around a cruise port, a lagoon and one of the busiest airports in the eastern Caribbean. Saint Martin in the north is slower, with a market town, a hilltop fort and a coastline of small bays. Together they make the smallest inhabited island anywhere split between two nations, and a holiday where lunch can change country halfway through, with nothing but a roadside monument to mark the spot. The crossing itself asks nothing of you, which is why the formalities that do are the ones that catch people out. Almost everyone arrives on the Dutch side, and clearing immigration there admits you to the whole island, because nobody checks the internal line. Arrivals into the Dutch-side airport, and yachts, are asked to complete an electronic entry form online before travelling, submitted through the territory's own offi...

Stingray City is a shallow bank in the North Sound where boats stop, passengers step off into waist-deep turquoise water, and southern stingrays glide around their legs like cats that have learned the boat schedule. That a sandbar in the middle of the sea is the country's signature sight tells you most of what you need to know. This is a British overseas territory of three low coral islands, and the land is largely somewhere to sleep between swims. The sandbar is also a designated wildlife interaction zone, one of the few places in Cayman waters where feeding marine life is allowed, and the boats that work it operate under licence conditions. Getting in is refreshingly old-fashioned. Grand Cayman holds the international airport, with direct flights from American cities and onward hops to Cayman Brac and Little Cayman, and the formalities are the traditional ones: a passport valid beyond your return date, a paid return or onward ticket, an address for your stay and enough funds ...

The hard part of Cuba is not the travelling, it is the fortnight before it and, for some visitors, the years afterwards. Travellers who have been in Cuba since a cut-off date early in this decade are no longer eligible for the American visa waiver scheme: an authorisation already granted can be revoked, and an embassy appointment for a full visa replaces the online form that used to take minutes. That catches British, Irish, German and other passport holders who assumed the two trips had nothing to do with each other. The rules move with administrations, so check the current position before booking either journey. What you get in return is a country of extraordinary texture, with UNESCO listings at Old Havana, colonial Trinidad and the tobacco fields of the Viñales valley. The entry paperwork runs in a fixed order and all of it is done at home. The paper tourist card has gone: everyone needs an electronic visa bought before departure, and its number then goes into a separate online...

Greece has decided that its most photographed island needs fewer people on it, and the measures now in force fall on two different groups. Cruise passengers meet a daily ceiling and a landing fee paid through the ship. Everyone else meets a nightly charge on the room, scaled to the category of the property, which the booking platforms leave out of the price they show. Neither will change a holiday, but both are worth knowing before the bill arrives. What they protect is a crescent of cliff left behind when one of the largest known eruptions blew the volcano hollow and let the sea in, the southern anchor of the Cyclades and a caldera that still looks unreal on the approach. The cruise mechanism is worth understanding, because it decides which days feel crowded. Ships are now counted against the daily ceiling at full berth capacity, where the port previously assumed a partial load, which has pushed the largest vessels out of the calendar and cut scheduled calls sharply. Slots go to t...

The map tempts you to loop everything, Skye, Glencoe, the far north, the whisky glens, and the region punishes the attempt: distances stretch, single-track roads slow to the speed of courtesy, and the weather rewrites afternoons without asking. What has changed lately is a second layer of small rules that shapes the day as firmly as the driving: permission to enter the country sorted weeks ahead, charged car parks at the famous trailheads, a mountain railway that will not let you out at the top in summer. None of it is onerous, all of it rewards reading ahead, and behind it sits the emptiest, wildest corner of Britain, from its highest mountain to the Flow Country peatlands that UNESCO lists. Start with the permission, because without it nobody boards. Visitors from countries that need no visa for a short stay now require an electronic travel authorisation before flying to the UK, applied for through the official app, usually decided quickly but best done several working days ahead...

The great set pieces of this city ask nothing at the door. The National Museum of Scotland and the national galleries are free, Arthur's Seat rises green and wild a short walk from the parliament and costs only the effort, and the castle sits on a volcanic plug that the whole capital is arranged around. What does carry a charge now is the bed. Edinburgh has become the first city in Britain with a mandatory city-wide visitor levy on paid overnight stays, which turns the usual arithmetic of a city break on its head: the sightseeing is close to free and the sleeping has gone up. Arthur's Seat, incidentally, is a proper walk rather than a stroll, steeper coming down than going up and fully exposed to the weather, so boots beat trainers. Two pieces of paperwork come before any of it. Visitors from countries that need no visa for a short stay now require an electronic travel authorisation before flying to the UK, applied for in advance and checked at boarding, with British and Ir...

The lavender that fills the photographs blooms in a short window around midsummer, earlier on the low plains and later on the high plateau around Valensole, and then the harvest cuts it. Arrive a fortnight early and the rows are green; arrive a fortnight late and they are stubble. Plan a whole trip around that window and you have booked the most crowded, most expensive weeks of the year for a crop that may already be baled. For the rest of the year the region goes on being ochre villages, plane-tree squares, vineyards and Roman stone under a hard blue sky, with UNESCO listing Avignon's papal palace, the Roman monuments of Arles and the Pont du Gard. The border is the part that has changed while nobody was looking. Travellers from outside the European Union are now registered electronically on first arrival, with a photograph and fingerprints taken instead of a passport stamp, which can make the first entry of a trip slower than the old queue suggested. A separate online travel ...

Twice a day the sea pulls back across the bay and returns, over some of the greatest tidal ranges in Europe. What the photographs imply, and plenty of guides repeat, is that the Mont then cuts itself off. It does not. Since the old causeway was replaced by a raised bridge, the crossing stays in service all year on foot or by shuttle; on the biggest tides the sea rings the rock and briefly covers the esplanade by the entrance, for about an hour around high water. The tide governs the spectacle, not your ability to get there. UNESCO lists the Mont together with the bay, because the setting is half the monument. There is no airport on the doorstep, though the border asks more than it used to. Travellers from outside the European Union are registered electronically on arrival, with a photograph and fingerprints in place of a passport stamp, so allow extra time on the first entry; a separate online authorisation for visa-exempt visitors has been postponed more than once, so check whethe...

Two things changed in Paris this year that the guidebooks have not caught up with. The paper ticket is finished: the little cardboard rectangles stopped being valid on the buses in the spring and on the rail network soon after, so arriving without a travel pass or a contactless bank card now means a queue at a machine before you go anywhere. And the Louvre has split its price list by passport, charging visitors from outside the European Economic Area close to half again what European ones pay, which makes nationality a line in the budget for the first time. Neither dents the case for the city: UNESCO lists the banks of the Seine, and that single stretch reads like a highlight reel of Notre-Dame, the Louvre, the great squares and bridges and the iron lattice of the Eiffel Tower closing the view. Arrival is the easy part, with two major airports and fast rail from London, Brussels and half of Europe, though travellers from outside the European Union are now registered electronically ...

The pale towers above the meadows of northern Italy began as reefs in a tropical sea, and the rock remembers it, glowing pink and orange at sunset in a show the locals call enrosadira. UNESCO lists these mountains for exactly that strangeness, sheer walls rising out of soft green pasture, villages below where the menus mix strudel with espresso. The mountains have not changed. What has changed is the way you reach them: one by one, the famous viewpoints have been turned into places you book rather than places you drive to, and a trip planned the way it would have been planned a few years ago now runs into a barrier or a full car park. Venice, Verona and Innsbruck are the usual gateways, each a couple of hours from the first passes, and travellers from outside the European Union are now registered at the border with a photograph and fingerprints instead of a passport stamp, which slows a first arrival. Cortina hosted the winter games this year and kept the useful parts: bypasses aro...

The compact heart of the city, listed whole by UNESCO, packs the Renaissance into a space you can cross on foot in under an hour: cathedral dome, bridge of goldsmiths, palazzi the colour of parchment. Much of its art never went indoors at all: it stands in the squares and on the facades, free to anyone who looks up, and the rest runs on timed slots a phone can secure weeks ahead. The part that now takes real planning is the bed: Florence has spent two years restricting how visitors are housed, and the rules have moved faster than the guidebooks. Getting there is the easy half. Florence has a small airport with a tram into town, Pisa's is a train ride away, and fast rail links Rome, Milan and Venice to Santa Maria Novella station. Travellers from outside the European Union are now registered at the border with a photograph and fingerprints instead of a passport stamp, which slows a first arrival and nothing after it. It is worth stopping to compare flights and hotels for Florenc...