There are still a lot of places we have to go/go to

Question

1. There are still a lot of places we have to go.
2. There are still a lot of places we have to go to.

I've asked some native speakers which sentence is grammatically correct, but they gave different answers. Two in three of them told me 1 is grammatically correct, but the rest told me 1 is wrong but 2 is correct.

I have no idea whose opinion is really right and why their opinions are different.

To my way of thinking, 1 is wrong, because a relative pronoun implied between places and we cannot be the adverb of "go". So, I think to make 1 grammtically correct, we should rephrase it as "There are still a lot of places for us to go".

Answer 1

Both are fine.

If you make it a simple statement, you almost always need the to:

We want to go to Australia.

We want to go to Paris.

We want to go to your house.

The only exceptions are adverbs and things that can behave as adverbs:

We want to go South.

We want to go home.

So logically, the relative form should be "There are places we have to go to."

But language is language, not logic, and what people say is what matters. "There are places we have to go" is idiomatic; and appears to be more common that "There are places we have to go to"

The iWeb corpus has 715 instances of "Where do you want to go" and only 27 of them are "Where do you want to go to". (I changed to the question because there are more instances of this in the corpus than your example).