8 Things You Need to Know About Traveling to Cuba in 2016

With its dazzling national parks, globally-renowned wineries, Andean ski resorts and top-class surf beaches, Chile is an attractive destination for travelers from around the world. Deciding you want to visit is the easy part; navigating the logistics of actually making that trip happen can be a tad trickier. Below is a useful guide to Chile’s entry requirements, including information on visa types, costs and all the details you’ll need to ensure a seamless journey in and out of the country.

Grand Cayman is the largest and westernmost of the Cayman Islands. Its proximity to Central America, Cuba, and Jamaica attracts a multitude of cultures. In fact, 143 nations are represented in a population that recently topped the 69,000 mark. That diversity is evident in Caymanian culture and in the incredible food, highlighted annually at the Taste of Cayman food festival.

For most travelers, entering the vast diversity of Ecuador’s Cuatro Mundos ("Four Worlds": the Pacific Coast, Andes, Amazon and Galápagos) requires nothing more than arriving with your passport.

Beginning on June 1, Spirit will become the third airline to pull out of the Cuba market altogether, joining Frontier and Silver Airways. Two other airlines, American and JetBlue, have cut capacity on their Cuba flights, either by reducing frequency or downgrading to smaller planes.

The last day in August marks the unofficial end of summer, and now also a historic day for U.S.-Cuba relations. JetBlue announced last month that it would be the first to send a passenger plane to Cuba in 2016, and at 10:58 a.m. today, fulfilled this promise.

Somebody had to be first. And when it comes to the relaunch of scheduled flights between the U.S. and Cuba, following the normalization of relations between the two countries after more than 50 years, it appears that JetBlue is set to snag those bragging rights.

It would be an understatement to say that travel to Cuba hasn’t met the airlines’ expectations.

In a historic agreement signed this week, the United States and Cuba have now resumed commercial air traffic between the two countries for the first time in 50 years, with routes expected to be running by fall 2016. Currently, only chartered flights are allowed to operate between the two countries.

Researchers in Connecticut are warning that tick populations are on the rise this year, so you need to be especially vigilant—not just at home, but also while traveling. If your trips take you anywhere within North America, Europe, or Asia, you could be at risk for ticks and the many diseases they cause.

With the launch of many new direct flights from the U.S. to Cuba, it may seem like the door to the formerly forbidden country is wide open for Americans. Unfortunately, that’s still not quite the case. Right now, you’ll still need to travel under one of the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) 12 categories of travel, the easiest of which is a “people-to-people” Cuba educational tour.

As a college student in 2002, I was lucky to be part of a small group of Americans who gained legal passage to Cuba through a little-known educational byway. I couldn’t have timed my visit better, because shortly thereafter the U.S. government implemented a policy change that eliminated the travel exemption for Cuba.

When Kevin Maloney started to plan his trip to Iceland, a friend mentioned a new service called ViaHero. “I knew there was a lot to see in Iceland and I had a short period of time. I didn’t want to spend a lot of personal time doing the research,” Maloney says. “My goal was to have an expert map it out for me.”