Second destinations rising

The travel industry has given this shift a neat name: “detour destinations.” The idea is simple. Instead of squeezing into Paris, travelers peel off to Reims. Instead of Milan, they try Brescia. Expedia’s 2025 trend report said these less famous places all saw search growth, and 63 percent of surveyed consumers said they were likely to visit one on their next trip (expedia.com). That sounds like marketing because it is marketing. It also describes something real. The reason is not hard to find. Global tourism is back at enormous scale. UN Tourism reported that international tourist arrivals rose another 4 percent in 2025 (untourism.int). More people are traveling into the same famous districts, waterfronts, old towns, and beach strips. Once a place tips into permanent crowding, the trip changes shape. You spend more time in lines, pay more for less space, and end up consuming a destination that has already been flattened into a product. That is why the appeal of second destinations is not just price. It is texture. Expedia framed these places as add-ons or substitutes for marquee cities, but the deeper point is that they still feel like places where ordinary life has not been fully reorganized around visitors (expedia.com). Booking.com’s 2026 destination list makes a similar bet from the industry side, pushing fishing villages, secondary cities, and reworked industrial hubs rather than the usual icons (news.booking.com). Travel companies are following demand, not inventing it from scratch. You can see that demand most clearly where holiday travel is intensely local and familiar. Airbnb said this week that searches for Ko Yao Noi in Thailand rose almost 50 percent in 2025, while interest also climbed in places like Udon Thani as travelers looked beyond Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket, and Chiang Mai for Songkran trips (news.airbnb.com). Its survey data were even starker. Eighty-nine percent of Thai travelers said they had visited a rural or non-urban destination in the past year. Ninety-two percent said they actively avoid crowded or overtouristed destinations (news.airbnb.com). That is not a niche preference. It is a mass-market reaction against friction. The card’s point about “cultural protocols” matters here because quieter travel is not automatically better travel. UN Tourism defines cultural tourism as travel motivated by learning and experiencing a society’s living traditions, heritage, values, and ways of life, and it explicitly says tourism policy should protect cultural heritage rather than strip-mine it (untourism.int). In practice, that means the best second destinations are not blank canvases for outsiders. They are places where travelers are expected to adapt a little: dress differently, ask before photographing people, respect worship sites, and accept that not every local ritual exists for visitor access. That expectation is part of the appeal. A commercial tour in an overcrowded hotspot often promises convenience by removing uncertainty. A second destination offers the opposite bargain. It asks for more attention and gives back a trip that feels less staged. Even the industry has started to admit that travelers want this slower, more grounded version of tourism. Airbnb’s Thailand data described the shift as “more intentional and experience-led,” with people seeking nature, scenery, and room to slow down (news.airbnb.com). There is a risk, of course, that today’s hidden gem becomes tomorrow’s content farm. Skift warned in March that creator culture can rapidly compress a destination’s identity into a few repeatable visuals and storylines, even in places that were previously under the radar (skift.com). That is the lifecycle now. First comes the detour. Then comes the listicle. Then comes the queue. For the moment, though, the opening still exists in places like Ko Yao Noi, where a major holiday trend is no longer louder streets, but travelers deliberately choosing the island that sits off to the side.