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The World's Top 15 Bucket List Trips Ranked—According To A New Report

Hot air ballooning over Cappadocia in Turkey is a bucket list item for many travelers.

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Bucket list travel aspirations tend to vary by individual, with every traveler curating a personalized list of places they'd like to go and experiences they'd like to try out one day. But some adventures around the world are universally enticing and tend to make the cut on many people's trip bucket lists. To determine which bucket list travel experiences hold the most appeal, adventure travel company Skyhook surveyed 4,000 people from around the world about their travel preferences.

As part of the Skyhook survey, participants picked three activities that would be at the top of their bucket lists. The travel company provided 15 common bucket list activities for them to choose from, which ranged from climbing Kilimanjaro, hot air ballooning over Cappadocia in Turkey, embarking on an Antarctica cruise, venturing into space and gorilla trekking.

A tent pitched up in snow at night with the northern lights flickering in the sky above. Aurora ... [+] Borealis and travelling. Photo composite.

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The No. 1 bucket list travel activity in the world, according to the ranking, is seeing the Northern Lights. Traditionally, travelers will plan trips to countries like Iceland, Norway, Sweden, or Finland for a shot at seeing the Northern Lights—receiving middle-of-the-night wake-up calls from hotels or lodges when the night sky is swirling with shades of green, pink, and purple or staying in glass igloos to watch the spectacle. Seeing the Northern Lights ranked highest among Gen Z, with 6 in 10 respondents in the generation notating it as a top bucket list experience.

While the Northern Lights are sometimes visible from the United States in states like Alaska, Minnesota, Michigan, Maine, and other Northern states, larger swaths of night skies in lower latitudes showed off the aurora borealis in May thanks to a global geomagnetic storm.

A family of four King penguins walking on the black sandy beach of South Georgia with the sea and a ... [+] cruise ship in the background

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Cruising Antarctica was a top choice for Baby Boomers, with 46% choosing it as a top bucket list experience. Cruises to Antarctica to see penguin colonies and humpback whales among the ice glaciers have spiked in popularity in recent years, but environmentalists have cautioned that more restrictions need to be put in place to protect the continent's wildlife from the "last-chance" tourism.

The only U.S.-based location to make it on the top 15 bucket list activities was a trip to the Grand Canyon, which is one of the country's most-visited attractions drawing more than 6 million visitors each year to see the Arizona landmark. The Grand Canyon stretches 277 miles with rocky walls plunging more than a mile to the canyon's floor. Visitors come to take in the beauty from viewing points at the rims (the South Rim is most popular), camp in the national park, or raft the Colorado River that cuts through the canyon.

A view of the rugged yet beautiful Grand Canyon national park during a bright day shows the ... [+] intricate details of the ridges and formations.

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Ahead, here's the top ranked bucket list trips around the world, according to the Skyhook survey:

No. 1: See the Northern Lights

No. 2: Trekking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu

No. 3: Visit the Galapagos Islands

No. 4: Climb Kilimanjaro

No. 5: Take an Antarctic cruise

No. 6: Explore the ancient city of Petra

No. 7: Everest Base Camp Trek

No. 8: Go on an African safari

No. 9: Dive the Great Barrier Reef

No. 10: Space travel

No. 11: Gorilla trekking

No. 12: See the Grand Canyon

No. 13: Ride in a hot air balloon above Cappadocia

No. 14: Visit Angkor Wat

No. 15: Surf in Indonesia

How many of these bucket list experiences have you checked off?

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SAP Concur Top Boss Touts New Business Travel Platform

SAP Concur, the behemoth of corporate travel and expense management, is flexing its muscles. Its new travel booking platform, now widely available in major markets, boasts a sleeker interface and richer content.

Sean O'Neill

The head of SAP Concur, the most-used travel and expense management platform, said the company had made significant strides with its newest travel booking platform.

Charlie Sultan, president, said that the phased rollout of the new Concur Travel, which began nearly a year ago, has become widely available in major markets.

"It's a consumer-grade UX [user experience] now," Sultan said. "It shows the traveler a lot more options on the first screen of your search results. You can see the seat maps on airplanes a lot clearer now. Booking hotels and car rentals is more streamlined. The info is richer. For example, if you want to know if your hotel has an EV charging station, that is listed."

Sultan spoke at the Global Business Travel Association annual conference in Atlanta on Monday, where Concur displayed the new Concur Travel with its revamped interface. The interface felt more intuitive to use than the previous one in a Skift test.

Concur as an expense giant

SAP Concur enjoys a dominant market position as a brand for integrated travel, expense, and invoice management. IDC estimates that Concur has about 51% market share, though that might be conservative, given that a majority of the largest corporate travel buyers use Concur.

In 2014, SAP acquired Concur for an enterprise value of $8.3 billion. At the time, Concur had 25 million active users. Today, 94 million individuals have access to its services through their employers.

Adding travel content

A key Concur focus this year has been on incorporating New Distribution Capability (NDC) content.

Since September, the new Concur Travel has become compatible with Amadeus and Sabre, the two most widely used global distribution systems, in many key countries, for American and United bookings done through the so-called new distribution capability (NDC) instead of the older Edifact method. Integration with Travelport, the third-largest player, is expected within six months.

Concur has also become more tightly integrated with other SAP systems.

"The more of your company's data you have going through a unified system, the better everything gets," Sultan said.

"We want to create a world where travel and expenses manage themselves," he said.

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