Morocco Travel Awards 2025

Morocco's Travel Industry: Where Ancient Civilization Meets Modern Luxury

Morocco is Africa's most visited country and one of the Mediterranean's most compelling luxury travel destinations — a country where ancient Berber and Arab civilisations, French colonial elegance, and contemporary luxury design coexist in extraordinarily photogenic settings. With 14 million international visitors annually and growing rapidly, Morocco's travel industry is experiencing a golden era of investment, international attention, and rising luxury standards across multiple destination segments.

Marrakech is Morocco's most internationally celebrated destination — a medieval rose-pink city where the frenetic energy of the Jemaa el-Fna square, the labyrinthine souks of the Medina, and the serene luxury of palatial riads create a tourism experience that is genuinely unlike anywhere else on earth. The riad — a traditional courtyard house converted to a boutique hotel — is one of the world's most distinctive accommodation typologies, and Marrakech's best riads compete globally as some of the most uniquely atmospheric small hotels anywhere. Alongside these intimate riad experiences, Marrakech has attracted investment from the world's top luxury hotel brands, with Mandarin Oriental Marrakech, Four Seasons Resort Marrakech, and Royal Mansour (owned by the King of Morocco) offering world-benchmark luxury resort experiences within view of the Atlas Mountains.

The Sahara Desert offers one of the world's most dramatic overnight tourism experiences — luxury tented camps at the edge of the Erg Chebbi dunes near Merzouga providing private pools, gourmet dining, and camel rides against a backdrop of dunes that stretch 50 metres high into silence and star-filled sky. Fes el Bali — Morocco's oldest imperial city and the world's largest car-free urban area — offers a heritage tourism experience of extraordinary depth, where 9,000-year-old medina streets lead to active medieval tanneries, mosques, and souks that have barely changed since the 14th century. Morocco's position on both the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, its proximity to Europe, and its Arabic, Berber, French and Spanish cultural synthesis create a travel market of remarkable versatility that our award categories fully recognise.