2025 was my fourth year of full-time travel (read here about Day 0, Year 1, Year 2, and Year 3). It was a “Year of Calculations”, as I had a big and expensive trip to #1,000 planned late in the year. The rest of the travel year was moulded to achieve exactly the right amount of WHS at the lowest possible cost.

My best-ranked newly visited WHS of this year, all 4* or more, include Djoudj National Park, the Ahwar of Southern Iraq, Damascus, the New Zealand Sub-Antarctic Islands and Macquarie Island. I am also glad that I could finally experience Iraq and Syria in a peaceful setting.

You can find my updated Trip Planner here, including the actual ‘results’ of 2025. With an added total of 54 (47 new + 7 from the WHC), I am still right on track.

The best ones are behind me

It’s a tough conclusion to make, but after having seen over 80% of all current WHS, I have to accept that I have already seen the best sites. Of course, there are still some to look forward to, but there is no Angkor, Florence or Virunga NP among them. I even got so far that I now only have 7 WHS left with a 4* or higher rating!

My favourite trips between #765 and #1000

During the past 4 years, during which I have been travelling full-time, these are the trips I look back to most fondly. In random order, they are:

• 5 weeks in Northern Brazil: all self-organized, the high quality of all (T)WHS here, and oh, the people!
• 2 weeks wild camping in Chad: so pure, like travelling in time. A collection of photos from that trip has been the screensaver on my laptop ever since.
• 3 weeks Zimbabwe in-depth, by all means of transport: I felt I got to know the country well.
• And of course, my cherry on the cake: the penguins of remote Macquarie Island!

The strategic approach for 2026

After passing the 1,000-mark, I am now embarking on a new stage of my WHS Quest. The cluster strategy has worked well: I think I have proven that focusing solely on WHS (rarely adding TWHS and no other ‘distractions’), choosing the biggest clusters of sites first and fully finishing these clusters (so not a single WHS in a remote corner is left behind), is a great tactic to get high numbers of ‘ticks’ quickly.

Things will be different for the next 100, because:

1. Keeping the same pace is financially unsustainable: it is not possible anymore to hold on to the 650-EUR-a-WHS rule that I set myself in the previous stage, even 1,000 EUR per WHS seems a stretch. The WHS that are left are often isolated, difficult to access and far away from my home base. Or lie in a country I won't travel to right now (Russia, Iran, Israel). So with the yearly budget staying the same, I won’t be able to squeeze the same amount of WHS out of it.
2. I got a bit tired of the cluster-approach: for every 10 WHS in a cluster, there usually are 4 poor ones, 4 that are OK and only 2 that are really good. So for the best part of a trip, you’re just ticking without seeing the best sights in the world. The cluster-approach also favours the large countries, and I don’t want to go to the same countries over and over again within a short time period (just to see more Chinese sacred mountains or Australian forests).

So for 2026, I will diversify more and focus on 3 types of sites:

1. Countries or regions that appeal to me but got left behind because they have only 1 or 2 or even 0 WHS, or where I first visited ages ago.
2. Good visits to natural sites. Taking Cerrado (Brazil) for example: you can have a perfectly tickable one-day visit to Chapada dos Veadeiros, as so many others did, but the real star here is Emas National Park with its Maned Wolves. This takes more time, money and research.
3. Back to Europe again. I have done only a few trips around Europe for the last couple of years since I have visited virtually all its WHS already. But as I have written before, the high number of visits to European regions is among the best experiences of the journey overall.

Overall, this year, I expect my trips to be a bit shorter (1-2 weeks), more frequent, and to result in less additional WHS. This way, it will take me 3 years to get to 1,100.

For the 8th year (almost) in a row, I am presenting a yearly overview of the reviews submitted to this website. 2025 was the year that the WHC meeting gave us some long-overdue favourites, such as Knossos and Carnac. With an average rating of 2.52, this year’s harvest is considered slightly better than the two previous years by our community members. We had a mini-meetup in Sharjah to visit The Other Emirates, and another group of intrepid WH Travellers under the guidance of Thomas visited Tubbataha Reef in the Philippines.

For the website, it was the year of the Great Migration. We have moved to a larger, more modern villa; we are still decorating all the rooms, have some boxes unpacked in corners, but are getting comfortable in our new home for years to come.

Community Travel

“1,000” is the number, as both Thomas and I reached that milestone this year, as the third and fourth members to do so, respectively. Zoë, by now, even passed 1,100!

Four members have visited more than 900 WHS (the same number as last year) and five more visited over 800 WHS (also the same as in 2024).

14 additional ones have visited over 700 WHS (last year 11). Wojciech Fedoruk, Patrik, Loic Pedras, Maciej Gill, Eva Kisgyorgy, Philipp Leu, and Philipp Peterer all crossed the 700 marker this year.

39 members are now in the exclusive class of having seen over 50% of the WHS (same as last year). Among those, Roman, Wojciech, and Patrik managed to add around 100 newly visited sites to their tally in 2025 and thus are the fastest risers.

So people are climbing up the ranks, but with ‘ticking’ WHS, this is a slow process. This list is not for the parvenus: it takes decades of in-depth travel to get to the high percentages, and of course, you are thrown back every year when 25 or so new WHS are declared at the WHC.

Memorable Reviews

We now have 11,035 reviews available on this website. A total of 634 new ones were added this year, about 50 more than in 2024.

WHS

18 WHS stay unreviewed. This year we saw the first reviews for the New Zealand Sub-antarctic Islands and Macquarie Island (both Els), Mt. Kumgang (Christravelblog), Mt. Mulanje (Randi & Svein Elias) and Mons Klint (Philipp and Szabolcs Mosonyi).

Other recommended reviews to re-read include those of Alejandro, who visited Coro; Zoe USA, who did Ani; ChrisN Purnululu, Mount Kenya by Randi & Svein Elias, and Els Niokolo-Koba (all sites last reviewed a long time ago). J_neveryes reflected on the costs of visiting Los Glaciares, CugelVance received a warm welcome at Al-Ahsa Oasis. Post-conflict reports on the current state of Aleppo were sent in by Aspasia and Els, and on Hatra by Clyde and Els. Xinjiang Tanshan was unravelled by Alejandro and the Mijikenda Forests by Randi & Svein Elias, Danjuan and Els. Jay T reported on the Pleistocene Sites, Kurt hiked in Khangchendzonga National Park, Xiquinho went to Xanadu, Zoë to Peruacu and Ammon to the Belarusian side of Bialowieza Forest.

TWHS

There are 772 TWHS left to review! Last year, I wrote about making a dent in those, but the issue is that the countries keep adding and adding new Tentative Sites. Yemen submitting a list of 31 mostly new ones certainly did not help! There are 1,801 TWHS in total, up from 1,756 at the beginning of the year. You can find the todos here (sort on Reviews and look for the 0 in the last column with the pen and paper icon).

Among the TWHS that received their first review was the nominated site of Songkhla by Frederik and Zoë. Phillip and Wojciech unlocked the nominated Condominio Theaters. Other notable TWHS reviews include Wanuskewin (GabLabCebu), Esztergom (Ilya Burlak), Region Lacan-Tún – Usumacinta (Dennis Nicklaus), Satpura Tiger Reserve (Kurt), Civil Rights Movement Sites: Moton High School (Jay T), and the Rocas of Sao Tome (Tony H).

Awards

You have made it to the Award Ceremony. It honours the "best" reviews submitted this year, divided into three categories: Misadventure, Explorer and Best Overall. If you are curious about Past Winners, have a look at the newly created Hall of Fame.

Misadventure

The Tsunami Award for Travel Misadventure goes to Philipp as he captured the frustration of a non-visit to the Migratory Bird Sanctuaries of China.

Explorer

The WH Explorer Award recognizes reviews of (parts) of WHS, where a new access route has been explored successfully, resulting in reviews that show determination and reflect on both the choices made during preparation and the journey itself.

My own travels to the Subantarctic surely ticked some of the boxes (remote, rarely visited and previously unreviewed), but at the end of the day, getting there mostly comes down to paying a large sum of money and a comfortable cruise ship on a scheduled journey will take you there. Dwight showed us a completely different side of Panama’s Transisthmian Route with his Camino des Cruces. And Jacob finally taught us the right way to enter Jamaica’s Blue Mountains.

But the 2025 Winner in this category is the Man of Crazy Trips, Wojciech, and his journey to Anticosti Island. He found a flight on a small, local plane with an unknown company and dared to book it. It got him to the island (albeit after a delay of 7 hours), where he drove all around, saw the OUV and had to sleep in his rental car as the only hotel on the island was fully booked. The story is all there, written up with sufficient detail, in his review.

Best Overall

For the Best Review of the Year Award (a good read that makes you wish you had been there), I created a shortlist of six candidates and asked the members of our WhatsApp group to vote. The candidates were:

• Maaloula by Els (celebrating the Feast of the Cross in Christian Syria)
• Tubbataha Reefs by Clyde (the non-divers liveaboard with like-minded WH Travellers)
• Berlin Modernism Housing by Nan (“A decade to see it all”)
• Vatican City during the passing away of Pope Francis by Jgriffindor6
• A rehabilitation of the Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz by Caspar
• Québec by Frederik Dawson (in the footsteps of K-fantasy series Goblin)

And the Winner is: nan with A decade to see it all. It has in-depth coverage of the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, intertwined with personal history going back to 2012.

Six notable reviews from 2025 will be shown again in the Featured section on the homepage in the coming week. Are there any other memorable reviews from 2025 that you’d like to put into the spotlight again?