Events
World Events & Festivals — Plan the Trip Around the Date
Events are the trips that need the earliest booking: hotels double, flights fill and the best tickets vanish in a presale. These guides explain how each event works, when to book, where to stay and how to move on the day — and link straight into the live hotel and flight search for the host city.
Rio Carnival
Two million people a day on the streets, and a purpose-built stadium where the samba schools parade until dawn. It is the biggest party on earth and it needs a plan.
Oktoberfest, Munich
Six million visitors, fourteen large tents and seven million litres of beer served at long tables you have to earn a place at. The trick is the weekday lunchtime.
Venice Carnival
Venice in February is cold, misty and full of eighteenth-century ghosts in silk. The Carnival is a fortnight of costume, candlelit balls and a woman flying over St Mark's Square on a wire.
King's Day in Amsterdam
One day a year the Netherlands wears orange, sells its attic on the pavement and turns every canal into a floating party. Book the hotel in January.
Notting Hill Carnival, London
Two days, fifty sound systems, a three-and-a-half-mile parade route and a million people in the streets of W10 and W11. It started in 1966 as a Caribbean community celebration and it still is one.
Las Vegas Grand Prix
A 6.2-kilometre street circuit that runs down the Strip past the Bellagio fountains and the Sphere, raced on a Saturday night in November at over 340 km/h. The hotels along it are the grandstands.
Songkran in Bangkok
Thai New Year is three days of merit-making at the temples in the morning and a city-wide water fight in the afternoon. Nothing you carry will stay dry, and that is the point.
TIFF — Toronto International Film Festival
Eleven days, roughly 200 films and the red carpets that launch the Oscar season. It is the most public of the big festivals — anyone can buy a ticket to a world premiere.
Art Basel Miami Beach
The main fair fills the Miami Beach Convention Center with 280 galleries; the city around it fills with a dozen satellite fairs, brand launches and the year's most exclusive parties. Miami Art Week is a marathon.
Coachella
The Empire Polo Club in Indio hosts the same line-up on two consecutive April weekends. Passes sell out in the January presale, hotels in Palm Springs go with them, and the desert is hotter than the schedule suggests.
Chinese New Year in Hong Kong
Hong Kong stages the lunar new year like nowhere else: a floodlit parade through Kowloon on the first night and a 23-minute fireworks display over the harbour on the second. Then half the city closes for three days.
Diwali in Delhi
Five days of oil lamps, sweets, gold buying and a night when the whole city lights up. Delhi is the most intense place in India to see it, with one caveat about the air.
Chauffeur & limousine booking
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