Bucket list destinations you can fly to from Manchester Airport from £35
Plan your next trip from Manchester Airport to some of the world's most iconic locations, inlcuding Venice, the Grand Canyon and the Great Pyramid of Giza
From the Great Wall of China to the Statue of Liberty, everyone has a destination on their travel bucket list that they’re itching to see.
Maybe you want to visit the Great Pyramid of Giza, the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World (a list first compiled by the Ancient Greeks).
Or perhaps you’re looking to tick off one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World - four of which are just a flight from Manchester Airport.
Countless other lists have been made highlighting the world’s natural wonders, cultural wonders and so much more, providing you with travel inspiration to last a lifetime.
With a route network of more than 200 destinations, many of these breathtaking locations are within easy reach of Manchester Airport, with return flights starting from just £35. Read on to find out more.
The Great Pyramid of Giza
One of the oldest man-made structures still standing, the Great Pyramid towers over the archaeological site of Giza, which also includes world-famous relics like the Sphinx. It was built around 4,500 years ago, and at around 450 feet in height, for more than 3,000 years it was the tallest man-made structure on Earth. Originally adorned in reflective white limestone that has since been lost to erosion, the pyramid was first conceived as a tomb for the pharaoh Khufu – but today it’s one of the most globally recognisable symbols of ancient civilisation.
Fly to Cairo with Egypt Air from £455pp return, direct from Manchester.
The Colosseum
By comparison to the Great Pyramid, the Colosseum is a new-build, at a mere 1,900 years old – but it’s just as iconic, and in 2007 was selected among the ‘New Seven Wonders’. Ancient Rome was a place of spectacle, and the Colosseum would have hosted everything from emperors’ speeches to gladiatorial combat and executions. It remains the world's largest standing amphitheatre. Surrounding the Colosseum are the remains of many other Ancient Roman sites, like the Roman Forum and the Arch of Titus.
Flights to Rome with Ryanair from Manchester start from £47pp return.
The Great Wall of China
At more than 13,000 miles in length, the Great Wall of China is one of humanity’s greatest feats of engineering. It was designed to separate the Qin Dynasty from marauding outsiders, and was rebuilt, remodelled and extended over the course of two millennia to reach its maximum size between the 14th and 16th centuries. Surviving sections of the wall are visible from space – and some of the most impressive remains are in and around the capital Beijing.
Hainan Airlines flies direct from Manchester to Beijing with fares available from £578pp return.
Petra
Few ancient sites evoke the mystery and intrigue of Petra, a lost city in the middle of the desert. It sits in central Jordan, about three hours south of Amman, and was the capital of the Nabateans, a civilisation who ruled over much of what is now the Middle East between the third century BC and the first century AD. The sprawling city is set in a deep gorge and many of its most famous landmarks are literally carved into the cliff faces – including the grand royal tomb known today as The Treasury.
Fly to Amman from Manchester with Royal Jordanian Airlines – from only £376pp return.
Chichen Itza
Another of the New Seven Wonders, Chichen Itza, is about two hours west of Cancun. It’s one of the best-preserved settlements of the Mayan civilisation, and is most famous for the huge, pyramid-shaped Temple of Kukulcan – but the site expands for nearly two square miles and would once have been home to more than 35,000 people. Visitors to this part of Mexico can also explore other Mayan sites, like Tulum, which perches on a cliff over the white sand beaches of what has today become known as the ‘Riviera Maya’.
TUI will take you to Cancun from Manchester for as little as £259pp return.
Niagara Falls
Niagara Falls is one of the world’s foremost natural wonders, a wall of water made up of three individual waterfalls that extends more than 3,000ft wide and 170ft in depth, separating two of the North American Great Lakes. The Falls sit on the border of Canada, a short distance from Toronto, and the US. They’re famed for their natural beauty but they also supply electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses.
Fly from Manchester to Toronto with Airtransat, starting from £449pp return. Air Canada also flies this route.
Venice
A unique cultural landmark, Venice captures the imagination with its classic Italian architecture, warren of canals and singing gondoliers – not to mention its remarkable location in the middle of a lagoon, more than a mile out to sea. In the Middle Ages Venice was a city-state that played an important role in trade across the Mediterranean, and the money pouring into it from around Europe funded the construction of iconic sites like the Doge's Palace and the Bridge of Sighs.
Fly to Venice with Ryanair from £35pp return.
The Acropolis
The modern city centre of Athens, with its bustling café-lined streets, incessant traffic and glass-fronted skyscrapers, is in marked contrast to the ancient site that overlooks it from a hilltop. The Acropolis has stood here for millennia, bearing witness to the rise and fall of countless civilisations and cultures. The Parthenon Temple is its most well-known structure and is remarkably well preserved for a building of its era, with its marbled walls and dozens of its famous columns and statuettes still standing.
easyJet flies to Athens from Manchester with prices from £82pp return.
Burj Khalifa
It might not be on the official list of modern wonders – but the world’s tallest building is a wonder to behold in every sense. It stretches more than half a mile into the sky, has 163 floors and took 110,000 tons of concrete, 55,000 tons of steel and 22 million working hours to build. Dubai as a whole could be said to be a wonder, when you consider that as recently as the 1960s, it was a small fishing port. Its transformation into a 21st Century metropolis has been achieved despite its desert location and searing summer temperatures of 50C.
Travel to Dubai in style on Emirates’ iconic double-decker A380 – the largest passenger airliner in the world. Emirates’ fares from Manchester start at £606pp return.
Gardens By The Bay
Another marvel of modern engineering can be found at the waterfront in Singapore. Gardens By The Bay is one of Asia’s most visited tourist attractions, with 10 million people coming to see it every year. It’s a huge botanical garden and park which combines natural outdoor spaces with climate-controlled biomes like the Cloud Forest and the Flower Dome, bringing together the world’s ecosystems in one place. The striking architecture of its biomes is only topped by the ‘supertree grove’, a cluster of more than a dozen 150ft-tall tree-shaped structures that house vertical gardens and put on a light show each evening.
Visit Singapore from Manchester with Singapore Airlines. Flights start at £668pp return.
Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty
New York City’s skyline is the world’s most instantly recognisable, and few cities have as many iconic buildings concentrated in one place as Manhattan. Famous skyscrapers like One World Trade Center and the Empire State Building have observation decks at the top – but for a view of the skyline that includes both of these buildings, head to the ‘Top of the Rock’ observatory on the roof of the Rockefeller Center.
New York’s Statue of Liberty was on the initial shortlist for the new Seven Wonders, and you can catch a ferry to see it from Battery Park at the southern end of Manhattan. Tours even take you up a spiral staircase inside the statue to a viewing deck in its crown.
Virgin Atlantic flies to New York JFK from Manchester with fares from £362pp return. Aer Lingus also serves this route.
The Las Vegas Strip, Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam
No list of world wonders would be complete without Las Vegas – not least because it tries to recreate most of the others in one place. The dazzling Las Vegas Strip, a four-mile stretch of neon-lit extravagance, includes Vegas’ answer to the Eiffel Tower, at more than 40 storeys tall; the Luxor Las Vegas Sphinx, which is even bigger than the original; a labyrinth of Venetian canals lined with Renaissance-style architecture; a 150ft replica of the Statue of Liberty; a life-size recreation of Rome’s Trevi Fountain; a 2/3-scale Arc de Triomphe...the list goes on.
Away from the stunning and at times baffling spectacle of Vegas, you’ll discover two of America’s most iconic sites just a couple of hours’ drive away. At 277 miles long and more than a mile deep, the Grand Canyon in Arizona is one of the USA’s great natural wonders. As it winds out of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River meets the Hoover Dam – one of the world’s most impressive feats of engineering. Taking more than five years to build and opened in the late 1930s, the 725ft dam was first conceived as a way of controlling flooding but is now a major source of power for the states of Nevada and Arizona.
Fly to Las Vegas from Manchester with Virgin Atlantic from £579pp return.