The annual Condé Nast Traveller Readers' Travel Awards honor the hotels, airlines, islands, tour operators, spas, cruise lines, cities, and countries that its readers see as most conducive to rewarding travel.

The annual country poll was conducted among 30,000 readers with evaluations based on 10 different categories, including “abundance of culture”, “variety of attractions”, “range of accommodation”, and “environmental friendliness”.

Vietnam entered the list this year for the first time, ranking 18th among the top 20 selected travel destinations.

India took the first position in this year’s list, compared with fourth place last year.

The popular South Asian country scored above 89 in all ten criteria, with its best features being culture (scoring 97.17 out of 100), value for money (94.78) and variety of attractions (96.30).

The other top 5 winning countries were Italy, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand. New Zealand scored highly for scenery and Italy has the best food and climate in the world while Thailand was singled out for its friendliness.

Together with Vietnam, Argentina, Chile, Japan and Egypt were the list’s newcomers.

In the global luxury travel trade circles, the Condé Nast Traveller awards are considered the equivalent of the Oscars of the travel industry.