Detour destinations: fourteen swaps that are better than the original
The second city is usually cheaper, emptier and — this is the part people do not expect — often the better trip. A list of specific swaps and why each one works.
onesim team
The "detour destination" is the travel-industry name for something people have always done: going to the place next to the place.
It is usually sold as a compromise — the same thing, cheaper, with fewer people. That undersells it. In about half of these cases the detour is simply the better trip, and the famous one is famous for reasons that stopped being true thirty years ago.
The swaps
| Instead of | Go to | Why |
|---|---|---|
Venice | Chioggia, or Trieste | Chioggia is a working fishing town on the same lagoon with canals and no cruise ships. Trieste is a Habsburg city on the sea with the best coffee culture in Italy |
Santorini | Milos, or Syros | Milos has the volcanic geology and the beaches without the caldera crowd. Syros is the administrative capital of the Cyclades, so it stays a real town in February |
Barcelona | Valencia | The same architecture argument, a better beach, paella where it was invented, and a dry riverbed turned into a nine-kilometre park through the middle of the city |
Dubrovnik | Kotor, or Šibenik | Kotor has the walls, the bay and the mountain, for a third of the price. Šibenik has two UNESCO sites and no cruise terminal |
Amsterdam | Utrecht, or Ghent | Utrecht has canals with wharf cellars at water level and a student population instead of a stag population. Ghent is Bruges without the queue |
Paris | Lyon | Two rivers, a Renaissance old town, the covered passages, and the best eating in France by common consent of the French |
Rome | Naples, or Bologna | Naples has the archaeology, the pizza and Pompeii on the train line. Bologna has the porticoes, the oldest university in the world and no queue for anything |
Prague | Wrocław, or Ljubljana | Wrocław is a Silesian old town with a market square as good as Prague's. Ljubljana is small, green, and walkable in an afternoon |
Lisbon | Porto, or Coimbra | Porto is the better-looking city and everyone knows it now. Coimbra has the university library and about a tenth of the visitors |
Athens | Thessaloniki | Roman ruins under a modern city, the best food scene in Greece, a seafront promenade, and it is the ferry gateway to Halkidiki |
Kyoto | Kanazawa | A samurai district, a geisha district, one of the three great gardens of Japan, and a fraction of the crowd |
Dubai | Muscat | The other side of the Gulf: mountains, forts, a corniche and a souk that is still a souk |
Split | Zadar | The Roman forum, the sea organ, and the sunset Hitchcock called the best in the world |
Ibiza | Menorca | The same archipelago, a UNESCO biosphere reserve, and beaches you have to walk to |
How to pick your own
Three rules cover most of it.
Follow the transport, not the name. The reason a second city is empty is usually that it has one fewer direct flight. That is also why it has kept its restaurants. Check whether a train from the famous airport gets you there in under two hours — very often it does, and the whole "hard to reach" reputation is a hangover from before the line was electrified.
Go where the country's own people go in August. Every country has a coast or a mountain range that the locals fill and the international market has never heard of. In Italy it is the Marche and Abruzzo. In Spain it is Asturias and Galicia. In Greece it is the Pelion peninsula. In Türkiye it is the Black Sea coast.
Look for the administrative capital, not the postcard. A place that is the local government seat has hospitals, universities, bus stations and year-round restaurants. A place that is only a postcard closes in October and prices itself for a single season.
Getting to them
The reason second cities stay quiet is almost always that they are one connection further out, and the connection is usually easier than the reputation suggests.
| Destination | From | Journey |
|---|---|---|
Chioggia | Venice | 25 minutes by train, or the bus and ferry down the lagoon |
Trieste | Venice | 2 hours by train; it also has its own airport |
Milos | Athens | 3 hours by fast ferry from Piraeus, or a short domestic flight |
Valencia | Madrid | 1 hour 40 by AVE |
Kotor | Dubrovnik | 2 to 2.5 hours by bus, including the border |
Utrecht | Amsterdam | 25 minutes by train, four an hour |
Lyon | Paris | 2 hours by TGV |
Bologna | Rome or Florence | 2 hours 10, and 35 minutes respectively |
Zadar | Split | 1.5 hours by bus; it also has its own airport |
Kanazawa | Tokyo | 2.5 hours on the Hokuriku Shinkansen |
Almost none of these is more than a morning. What they have in common is that no low-cost airline flies into them directly from northern Europe, which is the entire mechanism behind why they are still pleasant.
The honest counter-argument
Sometimes the famous one is famous because it is genuinely extraordinary and nothing else is like it.
Venice is not the same as Chioggia. The Acropolis is not replaceable by a different hill. Kyoto has fourteen hundred years of temples and Kanazawa does not. If the reason for the trip is the thing itself, go to the thing — book the timed ticket months ahead, go in November, and accept the crowd as the cost.
Detour destinations are for the other trips: the ones where the real goal is a week somewhere good, and the name on the itinerary was only ever a shorthand for that.
