What does a travel editor ask Santa for after a year of hotel inspections and long-haul flights? Condé Nast Traveller UK has answered with its first-ever Christmas gift guide, compiled by a team that collectively spends most of the year airborne. The pitch: every item has been genuinely road-tested — packed into overhead lockers, dragged over cobblestones, worn for eight hours on a red-eye — not just picked off a shelf.
The beauty picks lean heavily on the writers' recent trips. Beauty director Anita Bhagwantas highlights Dior's Forever Glow Luminizer, a vintage-style compact with peachy-gold powder, and Chanel's new Paris–St. Moritz fragrance, a pear, rose and musk scent inspired by Alpine escapes. For those stuck at home, Jo Malone's Vanilla Scotch candle apparently conjures a Highlands fireside from the sofa. One editor converted to Korean skincare after a May trip to Seoul, while Le Labo won another over via the toiletries in a Fairmont Hanoi suite.
Practical kit features too. The New York Times' Connections puzzle has been released as a physical book — ideal for a long flight, especially for anyone who has already solved over a thousand of them on the app. New Balance's 9060 trainers get the nod for city breaks built around 30,000-step days, and carry-on-friendly wrist and ankle weights make an appearance for people who want to keep up runs and Pilates on the road.
It's not all gadgets and grooming. Several lists tilt towards the cosy: Soho Home's Rio portable lamp, with its sculptural glass shade and marble base, tops one editor's wishlist for making time at home feel as considered as a hotel stay. Sephora's Favorites Advent Calendar — a set of travel-size minis — and Estée Lauder's Blockbuster kit, which bundles eight full-size products into a makeup bag, cover the stocking-filler and big-gift ends of the budget respectively.
There's also a refreshingly honest note buried in the guide: the best gifts, one editor admits, are the ones money can't buy — martinis with friends, powder days on skis, waking up somewhere new. The physical gifts are just the souvenirs of that. The team's 2026 plans, which shaped their picks, include a family-friendly luxury hotel in Austria, a Northern Lights hunt in Finnish Lapland, countryside downtime in England, and a New York city break.
Why it matters: this is a gift list written by professional travellers rather than stylists, so it skews towards things that survive actual transit — compact, durable, useful at 30,000 feet. If you're shopping for someone who's always boarding a plane (or dropping hints yourself), it's a shortcut to gifts with provenance.
