Dream Vacation Spot

One ticket, already paid for, anywhere on the list. Every round you lose somewhere you genuinely wanted to go.

Travel preference divides more cleanly than most people realise, and this bracket makes the division visible within a few rounds. Some destinations are about looking — Iceland, Patagonia, the Norwegian fjords, Salar de Uyuni — where the appeal is scenery that resembles nowhere you have lived. Others are about being among people, which is what Tokyo, Marrakesh, New York and Rome are offering. And a third group is really about doing nothing whatsoever, which is what the Maldives and Bali are selling regardless of what else appears in the brochure.

The bracket is thirty-two places wide, photographed rather than described, because that is how these decisions actually get made in practice. Nobody reads about a destination and then chooses it.

Most voters discover they hold a far stronger preference between those three categories than between individual places inside any one of them. After the first few rounds the bracket stops being about geography and starts being about which kind of rest you are currently short of.