Europe’s New Entry/Exit System Is Now Fully Live. Here’s What Travelers Need to Know

Food & Wine has released its 2026 Global Tastemakers ranking, naming the best cities in the world for food and drink after polling more than 400 chefs, travel experts, food writers, and wine professionals. The list reflects more than famous dishes or luxury restaurants.

It focuses on cities where markets, street food, neighborhood eateries, cooking traditions, and high-end dining all work together to create a complete travel experience. These are the first 10 cities on the ranking, and each offers a different reason to plan a trip around what is on the plate.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong took the top spot thanks to its extraordinary range. Few cities move so naturally between dim sum parlors, night markets, Cantonese classics, and polished international fine dining. It is dense, fast, and constantly rewarding for travelers who want to eat from morning until late at night.

London

London ranked second overall and first in Europe. Its strength lies in variety: Indian, Middle Eastern, Caribbean, Chinese, Italian, and modern British food all sit side by side. Borough Market, neighborhood pubs, and ambitious restaurants in Soho and Shoreditch make it one of the easiest cities in the world to eat well at any level.

Tokyo

Tokyo remains a city of precision and depth. Whether it is ramen, omakase, yakitori, kaiseki, or a simple market breakfast, the standard is consistently high. The city’s food culture is shaped by seasonality, restraint, and an almost unmatched attention to ingredients.

Mexico City

Mexico City combines street food energy with serious culinary innovation. Tacos, markets, mezcal, and deep regional traditions define the experience, but the city also keeps evolving through contemporary neighborhoods like Roma Norte and Condesa. It is one of the strongest food destinations in the Americas.

Bangkok

Bangkok continues to stand out for its explosive street food culture and broad flavor range. Floating markets, night markets, casual local restaurants, and Michelin-recognized dining all coexist here. It is a city where a traveler can build an entire trip around snacking, wandering, and eating late.

Lima

Lima has become a destination people now travel to specifically for food. Its cuisine blends indigenous Peruvian traditions with Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish influences, creating a scene that feels distinctive and globally relevant. Ceviche, tiradito, potatoes, and pisco all give the city a strong culinary identity.

Barcelona

Barcelona remains one of Europe’s most appealing food cities because it feels both refined and easygoing. Seafood, vermouth, tapas, anchovies, grilled fish, and market culture all shape the city’s rhythm. It is the kind of place where a casual lunch can feel just as memorable as a formal dinner.

Paris

Paris continues to prove that culinary prestige and everyday pleasure can exist in the same place. Michelin-starred restaurants matter, but so do bistros, bakeries, cheese shops, and neighborhood markets. In Paris, eating well rarely requires much planning because the city is built around food as daily culture.

Copenhagen

Copenhagen brings a more thoughtful, seasonal, and design-led approach to dining. Its food scene is tied to local ingredients, sustainability, and a strong sense of aesthetic restraint. Beyond famous restaurants, neighborhoods like Nørrebro and Vesterbro offer bakeries, breweries, and places that reflect the city’s philosophy as much as its taste.

Istanbul

Istanbul rounds out the top 10 with one of the richest culinary identities anywhere. Ottoman traditions, Mediterranean influences, bazaars, meyhanes, kebabs, mezze, and simit all contribute to a city that connects food with history at every turn. At the same time, contemporary Turkish restaurants are pushing the cuisine forward in ambitious new ways.

Minor Hotels is making one of the biggest technology bets in its history with plans to build a new global data and AI platform across its hotel portfolio. Working with Google Cloud, Salesforce, OneTrust, and Deloitte, the group says it will create a single system connecting guest data, marketing, and service operations across more than 640 properties in operation and committed development. The platform is scheduled for full deployment in 2026 and is being built from scratch rather than layered onto older systems.

That approach matters because many hotel groups still operate with fragmented technology across brands, regions, and customer touchpoints. A traveler may stay within the same corporate portfolio and still be treated as if they are new each time. Minor is trying to solve that by building a unified source of truth around the guest, so preferences, history, and behavior can carry across stays. In practical terms, the group wants a customer who checks into an Anantara in Thailand to be recognized more intelligently when they later book a Tivoli in Portugal or another brand elsewhere in the system.

A Hotel Platform Built for the AI Era

The company’s strategy goes beyond standard personalization. Minor is positioning the platform for what it calls the next phase of AI-enabled hospitality, where systems do not just answer questions but can help execute tasks. That includes the future use of AI agents that could manage bookings, curate itineraries, support hotel teams, and resolve more complex requests in real time.

This is a notable shift in how hotel companies are thinking about technology. The goal is no longer just smoother CRM or better email marketing. It is to create a commercial and service engine that can react instantly, learn across properties, and help the company defend its direct relationship with the traveler. That is especially important as more travel discovery and trip planning begin to move into AI-led environments rather than traditional search and booking flows.

Minor also appears to understand that this kind of personalization only works if trust is built into the system from the start. That is why privacy, consent, and governance are being treated as part of the architecture rather than added later. In a hotel context, where data can include travel habits, spending behavior, and personal preferences, that is not just a compliance issue. It is central to whether guests are comfortable with deeper personalization at all.

Why This Matters Beyond Minor Hotels

The broader industry relevance is clear. Hotel groups are increasingly being pushed to compete not just on property quality or loyalty points, but on how well they use data across the full guest journey. The winners are likely to be the brands that can combine direct booking, personalized service, and operational efficiency without making the experience feel mechanical.

Minor’s clean-sheet build is significant because it suggests the company believes legacy integration is no longer enough. Instead of trying to modernize old infrastructure bit by bit, it is building a future-native system designed for generative AI, automation, and cross-brand continuity from the beginning. That could give the group more flexibility than traditional transformation programs that take years to untangle older systems.

For travelers, the promise is a stay that feels more connected from booking to on-property service. For the industry, the message is sharper: hotel AI is moving beyond chatbots and basic recommendation engines. It is becoming part of the core commercial model. Minor Hotels is not just buying new technology. It is trying to build the operating system for a more data-driven version of hospitality.

The ceasefire between the United States and Iran may have lowered some immediate pressure in oil markets, but aviation executives are making clear that airlines should not expect quick relief on jet fuel. For the travel industry, that distinction matters. Oil prices can fall on a diplomatic headline, but jet fuel availability depends on refining capacity, shipping routes, and the time it takes for supply chains to normalize after disruption.

That is why the aviation sector remains cautious. Industry leaders say it could take months for jet fuel markets to settle even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens and stays open. The central issue is that the conflict did more than disrupt tanker traffic. It also damaged or constrained refining capacity across the region, which matters more directly for airlines because jet fuel is a specialized product and cannot be replaced as easily as crude oil volumes on paper.

The effect is already showing up in airline planning. Delta has said it expects second-quarter profits to come in below earlier expectations and is responding by reducing planned capacity growth. That is a familiar airline reaction when fuel becomes harder to predict: trim expansion, protect margins, and wait for clearer signals before restoring schedules. The risk is that if enough carriers take the same approach, travelers may see tighter capacity and firmer fares even after the ceasefire headlines fade.

Fuel Markets Need More Than a Truce

The challenge is not only political stability. Even in a relatively optimistic scenario, fuel shipments still need time to move, refineries need time to return to normal output, and routes through the region remain exposed to wider security concerns. Analysts have pointed out that reopening the Strait of Hormuz would not instantly restore prewar conditions, especially if tanker flows remain cautious or subject to new restrictions and fees.

For Europe, the problem is particularly sensitive because the region depends heavily on imported fuel flows and can feel supply shocks quickly. Industry officials are already warning about availability concerns over the coming weeks and months. That means the summer holiday season could still face pressure even if the ceasefire holds. Airlines may not be dealing with a full emergency, but they are still operating in a market where normal fuel economics have not returned.

What This Means for Travelers and Airlines

The wider implication is that aviation’s cost problem may now outlast the most intense phase of the conflict itself. Travelers hoping that fares will quickly fall back may be disappointed. Airlines that already raised prices or introduced capacity cuts are unlikely to reverse those decisions until they see more stable fuel conditions. In other words, lower crude prices alone may not translate into cheaper flights anytime soon.

This also creates a gap between stronger and weaker carriers. Airlines with better hedging, stronger balance sheets, or more pricing power can absorb prolonged volatility more easily. Others may have to keep cutting capacity or accept weaker profitability. For passengers, that can mean fewer seats on marginal routes and less flexibility at a time when summer demand is still expected to be strong.

The ceasefire has reduced one kind of uncertainty. It has not removed the aviation industry’s fuel problem. For now, airlines are planning as if high jet fuel prices and supply risk will remain part of the travel picture well into the coming season.

Valencia has approved a new set of rules for tourist apartments that will place some of the toughest limits in Spain on short-term rentals. The city council has signed off on an urban planning framework that caps holiday rentals at 2 percent of total housing stock in each neighborhood and district, while also reserving 98 percent of new housing for residential use. The move places Valencia more firmly in the group of European cities trying to slow the spread of visitor accommodation into everyday housing.

The decision reflects a wider shift in Spanish city policy. Tourism remains a major economic driver, but in places such as Valencia, Barcelona, Madrid, Malaga, and Seville, the expansion of short-term rentals has become closely tied to rising rents, tighter housing supply, and neighborhood frustration. Valencia’s leaders are now making the argument more directly: the city wants tourism, but not at the cost of residential function.

What makes Valencia’s approach notable is that it does not rely on one simple cap. Instead, the new framework uses several overlapping limits designed to restrict growth from multiple directions. Officials say this is intended to stop tourism accommodation from concentrating too heavily in specific residential areas or spreading without control through new housing stock.

A Three-Layer Limit on Tourist Growth

The headline rule is the 2 percent cap. Tourist apartments and similar accommodation cannot exceed 2 percent of the total housing stock in each neighborhood and district. That alone is a major tightening, particularly in areas already under pressure from short-term rental demand.

But the city has gone further. Total tourist accommodation of any kind, including hotels, apartments, and tourist homes, cannot exceed the equivalent of 8 percent of the registered population in each neighborhood or district. In addition, tourist uses on ground floors in residential areas will be limited to 15 percent of commercial premises within each block. These three thresholds are designed to operate together, meaning a new tourist accommodation project must pass all of them at once.

There are also location restrictions. Tourist apartments will only be allowed on ground floors or first floors in mixed-use buildings, cannot sit on the same landing as residential homes, and must have independent access from the street by separate stair or elevator. Community approval is also required.

A Housing Policy Framed as Urban Protection

Valencia’s mayor has framed the policy as part of a larger effort to define the city as residential first and touristic second. The message is that housing should function primarily for residents, not as a speculative asset tied to visitor demand. That is why 98 percent of new housing is now being protected for residential use under the new model.

Not everyone is satisfied. Neighborhood groups and opposition politicians argue the policy does not go far enough against illegal tourist apartments already operating in the city. Critics say the framework may limit future expansion without adequately dealing with thousands of existing units outside the rules.

Even so, the decision is significant. Valencia is no longer treating short-term rentals as a side issue of tourism policy. It is treating them as a central housing and city-planning issue. For travelers, the immediate effect may be limited. For the market, however, the signal is stronger: one of Spain’s most popular urban destinations is moving decisively toward tighter control, and other cities facing similar pressure are likely to watch closely.

Venice is bringing back its day-tripper fee for 2026, and this year the system is more structured and easier to understand. The charge applies to non-resident visitors entering the historic city only for the day during selected peak dates between April and July.

For travelers, the key point is practical rather than political: if you are visiting Venice without an overnight stay, you may need to register in advance, pay the fee, and carry a QR code.

Officially, for 2026 the fee applies from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on designated dates, and payment or exemption registration must be completed through the city’s access fee portal. Registration site: cda.ve.it/en.

Visitors who register and pay at least four days before arrival will pay 5 euros. Those who leave it later will pay 10 euros. Anyone who enters during the controlled hours without payment or without a valid exemption QR code can face a fine of 50 to 300 euros.

The system is aimed specifically at day-trippers. Overnight guests are exempt from the fee, but they still need to register for an exemption QR code. Residents, Venetian-born visitors, students, and workers are also exempt under the city’s rules. Visitors arriving before 8:30 a.m. or after 4:00 p.m. do not have to pay.

The 2026 Fee Dates

The daytripper fee will be taxed on the following dates:

April: 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30
May: 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31
June: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28
July: 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26

That means visitors planning a spring or early summer day trip need to check their date carefully before arriving. The city will check QR codes at access points, including major transport gateways, and the system is designed to catch people who assume they can simply walk in without registering.

Venice introduced the fee as part of its response to overtourism, but for visitors the real issue is timing and compliance. The city is not closing itself off, and the amount is not high enough to stop most tourists from coming. What it does do is make last-minute day visits slightly more expensive and much less casual than before.

For travelers, the rule is straightforward. If you are staying overnight, make sure you register for the exemption code. If you are coming only for the day during one of the listed dates, register early, pay the lower amount, and keep your QR code ready. In 2026, Venice is making it clear that even a short visit now comes with entry rules.