Top 10 hotels and cities for vacations in 2010

Get out your bucket list. Travel + Leisure gave explorers a sneak peek at its 2010 World's Best Awards recently, ranking everything from hotels to airlines to rental car agencies to best cities to visit both abroad and in the U.S. and Canada.

The top North American city to visit was New York, followed by San Francisco, Charleston, South Carolina and Chicago. New Orleans returned to the list -- as number 7 -- for the first time since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005.

Despite the recession and the negative publicity surrounding the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, hotels and restaurants in the Big Easy are experiencing their best year since 2005, ranking first in growth out of the top 25 U.S. markets for hotel performance, according to a survey by Smith Travel Research.