The Best Trips I've Taken Were All Someone Else's "Second Choice" Destination

Same coastline, same charm, same "I can't believe this place is real" feeling, for roughly half the price and a fraction of the crowd. Here's where smart travelers are actually going in 2026.

There's a very specific kind of disappointment that comes from finally arriving at a place you've dreamed about for years, only to find yourself shuffling through a roped-off viewpoint with three hundred other people holding up their phones. It happens in Santorini in July. It happens in Venice basically year-round now. And it's exactly the experience a growing number of travelers have decided to opt out of entirely, not by staying home, but by choosing somewhere else that gives them the same feeling without the queue, the surcharge, or the sense that they're watching a place slowly get worn down by its own popularity. Why "Destination Dupes" Became 2026's Biggest Travel Trend The term itself borrows from beauty and fashion, where a "dupe" is a cheaper product that looks and performs almost identically to the expensive original. Applied to travel, a destination dupe is a lesser-known place that delivers the same core experience, the coastline, the old-town charm, the food culture, the golden-hour photo, as a famous hotspot, minus the inflated prices and the wall-to-wall tourists. It's not about settling for less. It's about realizing that the thing you actually wanted was never the brand name on the destination, it was the feeling, and that feeling is often available somewhere quieter and considerably cheaper. Multiple travel platforms have tracked the shift with real booking data. GetYourGuide's research found that a meaningful share of travelers now cite cost savings as their primary motivation for choosing a lesser-known alternative over the iconic original, while newer surveys commissioned across the UK travel market show the same pattern playing out with iconic hotspots like the Amalfi Coast, Mykonos, and the Maldives. The driving force is straightforward: airfares have climbed, peak-season accommodation in famous destinations has become genuinely difficult to justify, and a generation of travelers raised on constant social comparison has started prioritizing an authentic, uncrowded experience over a recognizable location tag. "Destination dupes are a practical response to rising costs, but the bigger story is behavioural. Travellers are keeping the aspiration and changing the execution." Seven Swaps Worth Actually Booking This Year Kotor Bay, Montenegro Swap for: the Amalfi Coast, Italy Positano and Amalfi earned their reputation honestly, pastel villages stacked into cliffs above impossibly blue water. But a single dinner with a sea view in high season can run well past what most travelers budget for an entire day, and the coastal road grinds to a standstill by mid-morning. Kotor Bay delivers a startlingly similar silhouette: a fjord-like inlet ringed by mountains, a walkable medieval old town wrapped in Venetian stone walls (Montenegro spent centuries under Venetian rule, and it shows), and boat trips out to tiny island churches that feel plucked from the same postcard rack. Accommodation and dining run at a fraction of Amalfi prices, and the crowds, while growing, are nowhere near the standstill-traffic levels of an Italian August.

Ksamil and the Albanian Riviera

Swap for: Santorini, Greece

Nothing fully replicates Santorini's caldera views, but the wider point of a Santorini trip for most travelers, blindingly white architecture, cliffside towns, and turquoise water so saturated it looks edited, has a genuine rival just across the Adriatic. Albania's southern coastline, anchored around the small beach town of Ksamil, has spent the last few years quietly building a reputation among European travelers for delivering Greek-island water clarity at prices that feel almost like a typo compared to the Cyclades in peak season. Dragonpass-commissioned research into 2026 UK travel trends specifically flagged Ksamil as one of the top swaps travelers are actively booking instead of the traditional Greek island circuit.

Ljubljana, Slovenia

Swap for: Venice, Italy

Venice's overtourism problem has become so severe that the city now charges day-trippers an entry fee just to manage foot traffic through St. Mark's Square. Ljubljana, Slovenia's compact riverside capital, offers a version of the same romantic European charm, a hilltop castle overlooking a old town laced with pedestrian bridges and riverside cafes, without a single gondola tout in sight. It's smaller in scale than Venice, genuinely walkable in an afternoon, and consistently ranks among Europe's most livable, least touristy capitals, which means the streets feel like they still belong to the people who live there.

Fes, Morocco

Swap for: Marrakech, Morocco

This one's a swap within the same country, which makes it especially easy to pull off. Marrakech remains a fantastic city, but its central souks and riad district have become so saturated with tour groups and aggressive vendor pressure that the experience can feel more transactional than immersive. Fes, a few hours north, holds what's widely considered the best-preserved medieval medina in the Arab world, a genuine UNESCO World Heritage labyrinth of leather tanneries, artisan workshops, and covered souks, with noticeably less hustle and considerably lower accommodation costs than Marrakech's riad scene.

Pai, Thailand

Swap for: Ubud, Bali

Ubud built its reputation as Southeast Asia's wellness capital, rice terraces, yoga retreats, a slower pace of life, but a decade of viral popularity has left its main streets clogged with scooter traffic and its once-tranquil retreat centers booked out months in advance at premium prices. Pai, a small mountain town in northern Thailand, delivers the same jungle-and-rice-paddy scenery and the same laid-back wellness culture, with a noticeably lower cost of living and none of the traffic jams that now define central Ubud during peak season.

Lecce, Italy

Swap for: Rome, Italy

Rome's ancient ruins are genuinely unmatched, but for travelers chasing that specific feeling of wandering golden-stone streets between elaborate Baroque churches without fighting through tour groups at every turn, Lecce in Italy's southern Puglia region delivers an entirely different pace. Sometimes called the "Florence of the South," Lecce's historic center is built almost entirely from a soft local limestone that gives the whole city a warm, honey-colored glow at sunset, paired with a restaurant scene built around Puglian cuisine that costs noticeably less than a comparable meal near Rome's tourist core.

Zanzibar, Tanzania

Swap for: the Maldives

The Maldives remains the gold standard for overwater-bungalow, powder-sand luxury, and it's priced accordingly, often putting a single week's stay well out of reach for anyone not specifically saving for the trip. Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania, offers the same startlingly white sand and warm, clear Indian Ocean water, plus a genuinely distinct cultural layer the Maldives can't match: Stone Town's centuries of Swahili, Arab, and Persian trading history, spice plantation tours, and a much lower overall cost of accommodation and food, even at the nicer beachfront resorts.

How to actually spot a good dupe before you book

Not every "hidden gem" recommendation holds up in person, so it helps to do a little homework first. Cross-check recent Google reviews and travel-forum posts from the last few months rather than older listicles, since infrastructure and crowd levels in emerging destinations can shift quickly once a place starts trending. It's also worth comparing flight and visa logistics honestly, some dupes require an extra connection or a visa the original destination wouldn't, and factoring that into your real cost comparison, not just the nightly hotel rate.

The Trade-Off Nobody Puts in the Headline

None of this means the original destinations aren't worth visiting, and a genuine dupe rarely offers an identical experience down to the last detail. Santorini's caldera sunset is still Santorini's caldera sunset, and no amount of clever marketing changes that. What destination dupes actually offer is a different kind of value calculation: instead of spending a large travel budget chasing one famous view you'll share with several hundred other people at the same railing, you get a comparable, often more textured experience, with money left over for a longer trip, a nicer meal, or simply less financial stress hanging over the whole vacation. For a growing number of travelers in 2026, that trade has stopped feeling like a compromise and started feeling like the smarter way to travel in the first place.