Coolcations are hot, but I'd rather drink a mojito than be one

Cold apparently is the new hot. Blame climate change, over-tourism or a Trump-related backlash against the tan, but in 2026 holiday hotspots are anything but.

Searches for cooler destinations surged by 74 per cent last year according to online agency Trip.com, and global travel network Virtuoso just named Iceland, Antarctica and Norway as its top three destinations on the rise. Meanwhile, "coolcation" made the Collins Dictionary Word of the Year list.

We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. We're in Nuuk or the Faroe Islands or the High Canadian Arctic or any other place where chilling out is entirely literal.

Even dedicated heat-seekers are cooling off. A friend of mine, whose holiday longitudinal position never strays farther than 10 degrees from the equator, just did one of those Wim Hof cold retreats.

You know Wim - he's the wild-eyed beardy bloke dubbed The Iceman for his feats of extreme cold exposure. He's climbed Everest clad only in shorts, run a barefoot Arctic marathon and hung by one finger at a 2000-metre altitude. None of which are activities commonly featured in a holiday brochure.

And yet people are queueing up to pay a cool $5000 to hike Swedish alpine summits in their bathers followed by Wim's favourite wind-down: immersing yourself in a container filled with ice, like a human mojito. Promotional photos of participants labouring across snowy wastes resemble damning evidence from a Stalin-era Siberian gulag.

"It was life-changing," said my cold-convert friend. "The secret is tricking your body into thinking it's dying."

I'd argue that you can do that perfectly well by working through the whole cocktail menu at a tropical resort where the pool, not your nose, is blue, your bikini is climate appropriate, and you can nurse yourself gently back to life in a hammock.

Here's my problem with cold destinations: I want to drink mojitos, not be one.

Cold looks pretty on a Christmas card, but really it's about enduring adversity. I know this. I grew up with it in the far north of Scotland, where for five months of the year we couldn't feel our feet.

February daylight hours were a blink-and-miss-it event. School required so many top-to-toe layers that a new kid was there for an entire term before we saw his face.

We did not wanna build a snowman. We were outnumbered by them, plus snow Darth Vaders, Barbies, Incredible Hulks and all the snow cities for them to live in. Those Scandinavian ice hotels hold no allure for me, because my brother and I once built three of them in the garden over a long weekend.

My first hot holiday was revelatory. In the Caribbean, which does exactly what it promises on the postcard, I discovered a dreamworld come true - palm trees, luminous beaches, luscious fruits, lilting reggae. Rays that warm your bones, kiss your skin and melt your blues. It was like tasting wine or chocolate for the first time. The world had revealed itself sunny side up.

Thereafter, I built my bucket list around high-pressure systems and eventually chased the sun all the way to Australia, where cold is largely optional.