The World's Top Tourist Attractions

Updated on 1 November 2017

Purpose

I use this to keep track of websites that provide lists to the most important tourist attractions around the world -- which I use for my work. I maintains this more like a webpage and will update it as I find resources to add. Suggestions are welcome.

Lists of theTop Tourist Attractions in the World

1 - Planetware - Attractions listed by country - based on Baedeker Guides, this may be the most complete list of top attractions (4 and 5 star-rated), listed by country, that is available anywhere. From this link, click on a country, then click on Top Attractions. For a more complete list (and alternative attractions) click on the Attractions link.

2 - World Tourist Attraction Guide - A fairly comprehensive list of major world tourist attractions by region. Also includes country information, contact addresses for additional tourist information, videos and photos of some destinations, and maps. Some areas may still be under construction.

3 - Hillman Wonders - World's Top 100 Wonders of the World - Also liste by country. Individual descriptions are provided for most sites.

4 - Sightsmap - A Google Map of the most photographed places on the internet. Zoom in at any scale to see the ten most photographed sites, which are frequently also the ten most popular or visited attractions. Zoom in even more to see actual photos.

5 - National Geographic's Destinations website - with travel guides organized by region and country.

Top Specialty and Niche Attractions

1. UNESCO World Heritage List - Even better is The Tentative List (on the sidebar menu of this site), which includes sites that countries plan to propose to the Heritage List in the future, and many of which are "undiscovered" by the mass tourism industry.Also on the sidebar menu is their World Heritage in Danger List.

2. Atlas Obscura - A listing of some of the more obscure (odd, unusual and often dark) attractions around the world.

3. Protected Planet - A Google Map showing protected natural areas of the world, with links to additional information.

Related Attraction Resources

1 - World Tourism Directory - Comprehensive list of tourism offices, tourism schools, country and attraction information, and more. Also try the UNWTO Membership Directory.

2 - Travel Photo Base.com - Annotated photos for a huge number of places around the US and the World. - Also see: Fotopedia.com, which seems to have become more popular in recent years.

G4T #59: Teaching Tourism with Social Software

This is a Geography for Travelers Podcast related post (click on the title above to open the .mp3 file)

CLICK THE EMBEDDED LINK BELOW TO HEAR AND SEE THIS PRESENTATION

Today's podcast is a presentation that I gave at the NAU eLearning Institute in May, 2007. I gave a 1 hour presentation on how I used social media, especially blogs, podcasts and wikis, to teach an online class in Spring 2007. The class was titled "Planning for Sustainable Tourism."

Total Length: 54m 48sec

Here are some links related to this presentation

• Course outline posted on Web20Teach blog
• Elluminate.com
• InnerToob.com
• My Slideshare.net page - Powerpoint slides and forthcoming Slidecast for this podcast
• --- Slidecast for this presentation
• --- Bicycle Touring slidecast (from the 30 June 2007 G4T podcast)
• My Twitter

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Note that this version of the Powerpoint presentation is slightly different from the audio file. There are a couple of slides at the start and at the end that were not in the presentation when the audio was recorded, and there is one slide at the end that I mention (very briefly) that is not in the slidecast. --- Long story....

G4T #45: Ecotourism and the Grand Canyon, with Prof. Claudia Jurowski

This is a Geography for Travelers Podcast related post (click on the title above to download the .mp3 file)

In this podcast I interview Professor Claudia Jurowski of Northern Arizona University about her involvement with BEST Education Network and her research on different types of tourists to the Grand Canyon National Park, with some focus on the slippery topic of ecotourism and the ecotourist. Claudia teaches in the NAU School of Hotel and Restaurant Management (not Hotel and Tourism Management, as I stated in the podcast intro -- oops!)

To see the Grand Canyon Visitor Study (upon which Prof. Jurowski based her research study), go to the Tourism Library page of NAU's Arizona Hospitality Research and Resource Center. This site also contains many other tourism studies related to communities around the state of Arizona.

Length: 29min, 26 sec

G4T #37.5: Tourism Tech Talk: Teaching Tourism

(click on the title above to download the .mp3 file)

Something really different this week. Like last week, this one comes from my recent trip to Australia and the conference I attended in Brisbane. David Timothy Duval (University of Otago, New Zealand) and I skipped out of a session of papers to sit down and talk about how we use technology in our tourism classes, and in everyday life. I cut a few things out of our over and hour discussion, but I also inserted a few clarifications. We cover a lot of territory, from podcasting to blogging to wikis to RSS aggregators to social bookmarking, and more. The result is my longest podcast yet, at 1 hr, 5 min, 44 sec.

I recorded this using my binaural microphones, with one mic set on one side of the coffee table and the other on the other side. The result is mildly stereophonic, though the telephone ringing at the end is very directional -- it sounds like it is on the table across my office everytime I hear it!

Hopefully you will find it of interest, as David and I are planning to do this again, via Skype, and probably with a more narrowly defined focus.