2020 has been a challenging year for everyone. With the devasting loss of life around the globe, national lockdowns, and restricted travel, the world around us has changed. The travel and hospitality industry globally has been one of the worst hit by the pandemic. With school holidays cancelled and many intrepid explorers disappointed by being forced to cancel or change their plans. What was once a flight away has become a mammoth challenge, made even more difficult by the ever-changing rules and restrictions imposed by each country. There is hope with over ten vaccines currently being developed by large well-known and trusted pharmaceutical companies. There are positive signs with the vaccines all at different stages of the trial process. Hopefully, that we are getting ever closer to a solution that gets the pandemic under control, resulting in life beginning to return to some form of normality.

With the pandemic hopefully downgraded to an epidemic status and many first-world countries likely reopening their borders, international travel could quickly resume. Even with the likelihood that many countries will create restricted travel corridors from early 2021. Many industry experts predict a surge of bookings and large numbers of people traveling as we get closer to the summer months, which are traditionally peak or high seasons for travel. Using the Top 100 City Destinations: 2019 edition report produced in 2020 by Euromonitor International (https://go.euromonitor.com/white-paper-travel-2019-100-cities.html) and by overlaying the LGBTQ+ 2020 Equality Index (https://gayther.com/community/2020-equality-index/), it enables us to look at the top-ten destinations and how they score from an LGBTQ+ equality perspective. The Euromonitor report focuses on international travel, meaning people that travel from one country to another, rather than internal movements within any given country. So, let us begin