Every year Condé Nast Traveler asks its readers to rank the places and experiences they loved most, and the 2026 Readers' Choice Awards drew a serious response: 798,867 votes across the 39th edition of the survey. Among the categories, the best islands in the world list is the one most holiday-planners turn to first — it is essentially a crowdsourced shortlist of where travellers actually had great trips, not where marketing budgets were biggest.
The islands ranking sits inside a wider awards programme that covers hotels, resorts, cruises, spas, cities and more. This year's results paint a picture of where wanderlust is pointing: readers raved about palace hotels in Morocco, river cruises along the Amazon, and the pull of New York City. The islands gallery itself has been updated with fresh information since it was first published, so entries reflect current details rather than a stale snapshot.
What makes a readers' choice list useful is the context it gives you. These are islands that scored highly with a large, well-travelled audience — the kind of people who move between a Moroccan riad one year and an Amazon expedition cruise the next. That means the winners tend to hold up across travel styles: somewhere for a honeymoon splurge, somewhere for a barefoot beach week, somewhere that pairs sand with a genuinely interesting local culture.
If you are in early planning mode, treat the list as a starting point rather than gospel. Island destinations can differ wildly on seasonality, flight connections and cost, and a top-30 ranking says nothing about which one suits your budget or the month you can actually travel. Cross-check the winners against your dates and read up on shoulder-season prices before committing — the most popular islands are often also the ones where peak-season rates bite hardest.
For anyone dreaming of a beach escape for the year ahead, this is a handy, reader-driven gauge of where the love is flowing — and a nudge to book before everyone else on the list does too.
