There's an art to catching a destination at that crucial and fleeting stage between 'on the way up' and 'over'. Conventional wisdom and relentless PR would have it that a couple of design hotels can turn a leaden destination into one that glitters; but, in truth, the alchemyis more complicated. Budget airlines, celebrity endorsements and the student touch all play their part. Along with tactical use of Nato peace-keepers. Here's our guide to the magic ingredients that can make a destination hip. Be warned, though. If a destination ticks all the boxes below, there's a good chance its star is already on the wane.
1 The 'early adopters'
Want to know where you'll be holidaying in two years' time? Just find out where the students and gay travellers are going this year. The gay market - famous for being 'early adopters' - was partying on Mykonos long before the phrase 'boutique hotel' was even coined. Cape Town's meteoric rise over the past five years was helped by the pink pound, which also hiked Sydney up the style stakes and isnow doing the same for Buenos Aires.
Paul is a gay divorce lawyer, just back from two weeks at the Four Seasons in Buenos Aires. 'There must have been 30 gay couples around the hotel pool,' he says, before raving about restaurants and the embarrassingly good exchange rate. There's a new leather suitcase in his Islington town house that was acquired to accommodate the 15 pairs of shoes he bought on a last-minute shopping frenzy.
Love them or loathe them (and we've all tripped over their backpacks in airports), students are also good trend indicators. Grants may have gone, but student loans continue to fund a goodly set of holidays, fuelled by word of mouth with union-bar talk of idyllic beaches rather than chi chi hotels. So far this year, STA, which sends six million students across the planet each year, has seen a flurry of bookings to Recife in north-eastern Brazil and Cochin in Kerala. In Indonesia, Ujung Pandang, gateway to South Sulawesi's lush mountains, wildlife and coral reefs, has also - inexplicably - seen a 2,000 per cent increase in bookings.
Students have their uses in other ways, even when they're not travelling, given that they can party through pestilence, poverty or oppressive government. Any city with a large student population is likely to be worth visiting. Ryanair has just started a flight to Wroclaw. One in seven there is a student and, along with its 122 bridges and carefully restored Gothic old town, Wroclaw has the best nightlife in Poland. 'It's like a condensed version of Prague, minus the stag parties and kebab shops,' says Alex Webber of In Your Pocket, an enjoyably acerbic series of Eastern Europe guides.
As a rule of thumb, cities with large art colleges tend to have especially good bars and clubs, while those with jewellery or fashion-design colleges have better shopping. Antwerp, home to the fashion department of Belgium's Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Flanders Fashion Institute, is a shining example, and, as an added incentive, isn't on the hen and stag-party radar.
'Groups of men wearing dresses and women clutching blow-up dolls all doing the 10-pint challenge are ultimately the kiss of death to a destination,' says Webber.
2 A peace treaty (or revolution)
Nobody's suggesting that war is a good thing. But when it stops, you've often got the makings of a hot new tourist destination.
A revolution can be similarly effective - though preferably when carried out with the ironic use of papier-maché rather than violence.
Apart from the fact that conflict often breeds a thriving underground culture, (step forward Belgrade with its cutting edge club scene) there is the added 'oneupmanship' factor of being one of the first to go somewhere which has previously been off limits.
Beirut is often described as 'the Paris of theMiddle East'. Berlin might be a better comparison as it now has one of the hippest club scenes in the world. Recent bomb explosions in Beirut may have put off tourists for the time being, but when travellers venture back, rest assured, the Lebanese will still be partying hard.
Thirty years ago, Afghanistan was one of the highlights of the overland route to India. While it's currently off limits to all but the most adventurous travellers, Derek Moore, director of adventure specialist Explore, believes 'it's only a matter of time before it's back on the map'.
Moore was a tour leader on some of those early expeditions and would go back in an instant. 'It has all the right ingredients: dramatic scenery, a tribal culture, history and a stark rawness which grips the soul.'
3 The design hotel
When top designers start converting nihilistic industrial spaces into sleek hotels with art installations in the lobby, it's a good sign that a place is on the way up. However, one design hotel doth not a hip destination make. The imminent opening of Maastricht's new Kruisheren Hotel is a case in point. Unusually stylish the decor may be, but it will be a while before this Dutch town topples Milan off its perch.
Claus Sendlinger heads the Design Hotels consortium. His current tips include Spain - 'The Spanish are design-savvy but not as conservative as the Italians' - and Berlin, where cheap loft spaces have encouraged an influx of creative types. 'Berlin is the most affordable city in Western Europe, and if a place is affordable, you can afford to take risks, from hotels to shops and clubs.'
The opening of architecturally startling hotels in cities such as Buenos Aires (the Faena Hotel) and São Paulo (the Fasano) have put South America on the radar of international trendsetters.
Conversely, the boutique hotel can be the kiss of death for a destination's credibility, according to Glen Donovan who runs Earth, Britain's only ex-directory travel agency, catering to the rich and famous. 'A place is hip before it gets a trendy restaurant or hotel,' he says. 'When it gets a Nobu, like the one at the Belvedere hotel in Mykonos, a destination crosses over into the mainstream.'
This is potentially bad news for the Italian seaside town of Rimini which is pinning its regeneration hopes on the opening of designer Ron Arad's new duoMo hotel. Under Donovan's exacting criteria, Rimini might be over before it's even restarted.
4 The arts festival
There's nothing like an arts festival for boosting a city's credibility rating. Comedy (like Melbourne), film (Toronto) and music festivals are all good. Miami cements its position as the world's music capital with a Winter Music Conference each year - an event low on flip boards and PowerPoint demonstrations and big on general debauchery. Ibiza hosts one in the summer, Buenos Aires had one last year and there'll be one in Russia in June.
Mali's Festival au Desert, held near Timbuktu in the sands of the Sahara, is one of the world's most remote, and therefore ultra-desirable music events, where turbanned Tuaregs get down with the likes of Damon Albarn and Robert Plant.
Perhaps the quickest way to tap into the travel zeitgeist is to take a look at a DJ's booking diary. According to Pete Tong, Berlin's exploding ('It takes a few visits to get it as a city, but the scene's as hot as it was in Bowie's day, a bit like Paris was 10 years ago.') and - hard though this might be to imagine - everyone's raving about Frankfurt. Beirut is great and he's off to Orkney for the first time. Orkney?
'To be honest I was surprised to be asked,' he admits. 'But people in Glasgow and Edinburgh say it's really beginning to work up there.' Indeed, islands hub Kirkwall boasts a cutting-edge club, Fusion, in a former fish factory that has hosted Arab Strap, Finley Quaye and Brandon Block.
5 The low-cost route
In Europe you can usually count on the low-cost flight factor to boost a city - as long as you get there soon after the route opens. Tim Jeans, formerly of Ryanair, is the managing director of charter airline Monarch. And his predictions for 2005? He's plumping for the lesser-known cities of Spain. 'We're going to Granada, Ryanair's going to Santander - great cities with wonderful Moorish architecture, good hotels, fabulous nightlife. All we needed was the airport authorities to open them up. And Scotland; low-cost routes there have trebled in the past few years.'
Scotland is hard for me to imagine, but possibly that's because my mother lives in St Andrews, which continues to counter any tendency towards trendification with audible dismay (a new coffee bar with tea lights on the tables in the evenings, to take just one exciting innovation of recent months). But it's an established pattern apparently.
Put a no-frills flight on and early adopters fly out on a whim, followed by property-buyers. Although, ideally you should get there before the film crews from No Going Back and A Place in the Sun move in.
