Where to Fly Business Class This Summer — Six Destinations Worth the Journey

The Maldives has a reputation for being a honeymoon cliché, which is unfortunate because it obscures what the place actually is: one of the most extraordinary natural environments on the planet, available to anyone willing to get there. The atolls sit at sea level, ringed by coral reefs that shelter lagoons of impossible clarity. The underwater world here — manta rays, whale sharks, reef sharks, technicolour coral gardens — is among the finest accessible diving and snorkelling on earth.

May through October is the wet season, which keeps many visitors away and drives prices down on some of the finest resorts in the world. In practice, wet season in the Maldives means brief afternoon showers that pass quickly and leave the air washed clean. The lagoons stay calm. The reefs are spectacular. The rates at ultra-luxury properties can drop significantly from the December–April peak. For those who know this, it's the best time to go.

An overwater villa — the architecture the Maldives essentially invented for the modern hospitality industry — is worth the cost here in a way that it isn't everywhere it's been imitated. Waking up to the sound of water beneath you, stepping directly from your room into a lagoon, watching the sun set over an unbroken horizon from your own deck — these are experiences that exist here and essentially nowhere else at this scale or quality.

Iceland in summer is a fundamentally different country from the Iceland that exists in the popular imagination. There is no darkness. From late May through July, the sun dips toward the horizon around midnight and rises again before 3 AM — a soft, golden, perpetual twilight that makes the landscape feel unreal, dream-like, lit by a light source that doesn't exist anywhere else. Hiking the highlands at 11 PM under open skies is one of the stranger and more memorable things a person can do.

The landscape itself is an argument for a longer vocabulary. Iceland sits on the mid-Atlantic ridge where two tectonic plates meet, and the result is a country that looks like it's still being invented: black lava fields, crater lakes in vivid turquoise, geysers erupting on a clockwork schedule, glaciers descending to black sand beaches. The Highlands — accessible only in summer when the mountain roads open — are among the most remote and otherworldly landscapes in Europe, almost entirely without visitors.

Reykjavik earns a day or two before you head out. It's a small capital with an outsized creative energy — excellent restaurants, a lively music scene, and museums that take the Viking sagas seriously without making them stuffy. The Golden Circle and the South Coast are the standard circuit, and they're standard because they're genuinely extraordinary. But rent a car, head north to the Westfjords, and you'll find an Iceland that feels entirely unexplored.

Santorini deserves its reputation and earns its crowds — the caldera view from Oia at sunset is one of the genuinely iconic images of the Mediterranean, and it looks exactly like its photographs. But the Greek islands have a logic of their own: every island has a different personality, and the Cyclades reward the traveller who moves between them rather than staying put.

Paros is Santorini without the crowds — charming villages, excellent beaches, a thriving restaurant scene, and a pace that feels unhurried even in peak summer. Naxos, the largest Cycladic island, has the best beaches in the group and a mountainous interior of extraordinary villages and ancient ruins that most visitors never see. Folegandros is the island that people who have been to all the others choose when they go back.

The Greek island ferry network makes multi-island trips straightforward and genuinely pleasant — slow boats between ports, arriving to whitewashed harbours with fishing boats and the smell of salt and oregano. Athens is a superb bookend: the Acropolis, the National Archaeological Museum, the Monastiraki neighbourhood at dusk — a city that rewards the two days most tourists grudgingly give it before heading to the water.

While the rest of the world descends on Tokyo and Kyoto, Hokkaido — Japan's northernmost main island — offers a summer that is almost entirely crowd-free and unexpectedly spectacular. The weather is mild (temperatures rarely exceed 75°F), the landscape is vast and green, and in July the lavender fields around Furano and Biei turn the hills into something that looks more like Provence than Japan.

Hokkaido's food culture alone justifies the journey. The island produces some of Japan's finest dairy, beef, seafood, and produce — and a meal of Hokkaido uni (sea urchin) with rice in a harbour town, or a bowl of Sapporo miso ramen at 11 PM in the city's historic ramen district, are experiences of Japanese food that Tokyo visitors rarely access. The crab season peaks in summer; the melon from Yubari is famous across the country; the butter here tastes fundamentally different from anything you'll find elsewhere.

The national parks — Daisetsuzan, Shiretoko, Akan — are remote, genuinely wild, and home to brown bears, red-crowned cranes, and landscapes that feel entirely untouched. This is a very different Japan from the temples and neon of the south, and for certain travellers — those who prefer the natural world to the urban one — it's the best Japan there is.

The counterintuitive summer pick: while Europe bakes and overflows, Cape Town is in its cool, green, less-crowded winter. June through August brings temperatures in the mid-50s to low 60s°F — perfect for walking the city, driving the wine routes, and exploring the peninsula without the heat that overwhelms December visitors. The south African rand makes it exceptional value for dollar-spending travellers. And the food and wine scene has matured into something genuinely world-class.

Cape Town itself is among the most dramatically situated cities on earth — Table Mountain rising straight from the city centre, the Atlantic on one side, False Bay on the other, the Cape Peninsula extending south to the penguin colony at Boulder's Beach and the convergence of two oceans at Cape Point. A week in the city doesn't exhaust it.

The Winelands — Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, Paarl — are under an hour from the city and produce Chenin Blanc and Pinotage of serious quality, alongside some of the most beautiful farm landscapes on the continent. Franschhoek in particular, a small Huguenot village in a valley ringed by mountains, has a concentration of exceptional restaurants that would be remarkable anywhere in the world. The combination of Cape Town, the peninsula, and a few days in the Winelands makes for a trip of extraordinary range.