Overrated Travel Destinations: An Honest Take

Four famous places, four honest reservations, and four better ways to see them. None of them involve queuing for a sunset.

8 min read · 27 October 2026

No place becomes overrated by accident. It happens when one photograph does the work of a whole trip, the white domes, the gondola, the golden terrace, and the visitor arrives to find the photograph standing in a queue. The pictures aren't lying. They simply leave out everyone else who saw the same picture.

What "overrated" actually means

No place becomes overrated by accident. It happens when one photograph does the work of a whole trip, the white domes, the gondola, the golden terrace, and the visitor arrives to find the photograph standing in a queue. The pictures aren't lying. They simply leave out everyone else who saw the same picture.

Some of that is our fault. Lists like this one are part of how places get famous. So read what follows as the opposite of a warning: each of these four is worth seeing, and each has a gap between the image and the reality. Here is the gap, and the quieter, cheaper or better-timed way to close it.

Santorini: still extraordinary, rarely enjoyable in summer

The caldera is real. So are the cruise ships. On peak days, thousands of passengers come ashore within the same few hours on an island with a permanent population of roughly 15,000, which is why Greece introduced a per-passenger levy on cruise visitors to Santorini and Mykonos in 2025. Oia at sunset now works like a theatre with standing room only: arrive an hour and a half early, or watch the evening from somewhere that isn't Oia. The prices tell the rest of the story. This is among the most expensive island stays in Europe, in villages that now live almost entirely on visitors.

Go instead to Milos. It is a short flight from Athens, or a ferry of a few hours, and Sarakiniko, a bare white volcanic coast that looks borrowed from the moon, is stranger and more beautiful than anything on the Santorini cliff path. Or choose Naxos, the largest of the Cyclades, where inland villages still keep their own rhythm and the cheese and potatoes are the point of lunch.

If it has to be Santorini, go in May or October. Sleep in Pyrgos or Megalochori, not Oia. Walk the cliff path from Fira to Oia in the afternoon, three or four hours, and let that be your sunset.

Amsterdam: a city built for 900,000, visited about twenty million times a year

Between June and August the old centre feels less like a city than a queue between photographs. Museum tickets sell out, so book timed entry for the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum well ahead. Many of the "brown cafés" around the main canals now cater almost entirely to visitors; the better ones sit in the Jordaan and De Pijp. And the famous cycling isn't scenery. It's traffic. The red tarmac is a bike path, not a pavement, and a bell means move, not hello.

Go in April, when the tulip fields are in bloom and the city has room to breathe, or in September. If summer is your only window, sleep in Amsterdam and spend the days elsewhere: Utrecht is about half an hour by train and has the same canals with a fraction of the crowd; Haarlem is closer still and has a serious food scene. The Hoge Veluwe National Park lends out free white bicycles, and inside it the Kröller-Müller Museum holds one of the largest Van Gogh collections in the world.

Bali: the disappointment has a postcode

Most people who say Bali let them down stayed in Kuta, Legian or Seminyak: a beach strip with good surf, heavy traffic and a nightlife scene that could be anywhere warm. The Bali people fall for, the temples, the rice terraces, the ceremonies that spill onto the road, sits inland and to the east. Visitors now pay a one-off tourist levy of $8 (150,000 rupiah; ≈ €7.14 / £6.30), which is worth knowing before you arrive rather than at the airport.

Ubud is the usual answer, and it deserves a correction. It is no longer the quiet alternative. The Tegallalang terraces now come with swings, queues and a donation at the gate: go the moment they open, or drive further to Jatiluwih, a UNESCO-listed landscape of terraces that is far less crowded. For beaches, take a boat from Sanur to Nusa Lembongan and Nusa Ceningan. For calm, try the Sidemen valley in the east.

A word on risk, because it is mundane and it is real. Bali's most common danger to visitors is not crime or volcanoes but road accidents involving scooters. Don't hire one unless you are experienced, licensed and insured.

Venice: not overrated as a place, overrated as a day trip

Nothing else resembles Venice, and nothing needs to. The trouble is arithmetic. Roughly 50,000 people live in the historic centre, and in summer many times that number arrive for a few hours, walk the same two routes between the station, the Rialto and Piazza San Marco, and leave. The city has begun to push back: a day-visitor fee, introduced as a trial in 2024, applies on selected peak days. Overnight guests are exempt, which tells you who the city wants.

Go between November and February, with one exception: Carnevale in February, when prices climb and the lanes fill again. Winter Venice is cold, damp, often foggy and gloriously empty, and hotel prices fall sharply. Acqua alta, the high-water season, runs roughly from autumn to January, but the MOSE barriers in operation since 2020 now hold back most tides, so don't plan a trip around watching the piazza flood. Plan it around the quiet.

Sleep in Cannaregio or Castello rather than near San Marco. Eat cicchetti, small plates of fish, ham and cheese, standing at a bàcaro at the bar. Walk before nine in the morning, when the city belongs to the people who live there.

If you still want to go: visit the famous places out of season

Skipping every famous place would be its own kind of snobbery. Some places are famous because they are extraordinary, and the sensible response is to go at a time when they can be seen. The calendar does most of the work, and it costs less.

Choose the shoulder months at either end of the season. For the Mediterranean, that means late April to early June or late September to October. The sea is cooler, but the light is better, ferries and museums run normal hours and room rates can be a third lower. Winter works for the right place: Venice in January is foggy and quiet, and Santorini closes down so thoroughly that many hotels simply shut.

Then change the hours, not just the month. Most day visitors arrive between ten and four, so the first hour after sunrise and the last before dinner belong to people who are staying. Sleep in the place, not in the next town, and the best light is yours. Book the one or two sights that sell out (the Rijksmuseum, the Alhambra, the Colosseum) and leave the rest unplanned.

Finally, walk ten minutes in the wrong direction. The biggest crowds gather within a few hundred metres of the postcard, and they thin remarkably quickly. A bakery two streets back, a viewpoint reached by a stair rather than a cable car: these are often what you remember.

When the better answer is a different place

Sometimes the honest advice is not to go to the famous place at all, but to a cousin of it. Naxos for Santorini, Valencia for Barcelona, the Julian Alps for the Swiss ones. These swaps are not second best, and they tend to cost about half as much. We have laid out ten of them, with daily costs at three levels, best months and safety notes, in our guide to destination dupes.

The same honesty applies in reverse. A dupe is only worth choosing if it shares the thing you came for. If your heart is set on the Sistine Chapel, no Puglian baroque church will do the job. If you are not sure which camp you are in, put two places side by side in our comparison tool and see which one wins on your budget and your month.

The one habit worth taking from all four

Choose the month before you choose the place. Every destination above is two different destinations depending on the calendar, and the better one is almost always the less photographed one. Fees, levies and crowd rules in all four are changing quickly, so check current details before you book.

Want the alternatives in detail? Read our guide to ten smart destination dupes, or put two places side by side.