Destination Dupes 2026 Save Money, Not Always the Same Trip

Venice's day-tripper fee didn't stop anyone from going to Venice. It just added ten euros to the price of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with several thousand other people at St Mark's Square in July. This summer, a genuinely different response has started showing up in traveller data: not fewer trips, and not travellers giving up on the destinations they wanted — just a growing number of people quietly booking somewhere else that looks almost the same, for a fraction of the cost.

ℹ️ The Short Version

Destination dupes 2026 means booking a lesser-known city that delivers a similar look and feel to an overtouristed one, at a fraction of the price — Ghent instead of Venice, Jeonju instead of Kyoto, Siargao instead of Bali. It works when you wanted the vibe. It doesn't when you wanted the specific place.

Holafly, an eSIM company that tracks travel booking behaviour, published its first Travel Dupe Index this month, ranking international alternatives to ten well-known destinations on visual similarity, accommodation cost, crowding, and how easy they actually are to reach. Ghent, Belgium came out as the closest match for Venice. Banff for Aspen. Jeonju, South Korea for Kyoto. Budva, Montenegro for Ibiza. Siargao in the Philippines for Bali. Per Holafly's index, accommodation savings on some of these pairings run as high as 83 percent.

This isn't a one-off marketing stat from a single company. GetYourGuide's traveller survey, published earlier this year, found that 38 percent of travellers say saving money motivates them to pick a lookalike destination over the original — and among American travellers specifically, that figure rises to 45 percent. Two companies measuring the same shift from two different angles is usually a sign a trend is real, not a press release.

Travel And Tour World has been running its own version of this list since January, pairing Chicago or Mexico City with New York, Verona with Rome, Taipei with Tokyo, and Savannah, Georgia with Paris (the Paris one requires some imagination, but the tree-lined streets argument holds up better than you'd expect). The pattern across every version of this list is the same: a well-known destination's premium isn't really about the destination. It's about the name, and the name is the one thing a dupe can't actually replicate.

📌 The Numbers Behind the Trend

38% of travellers surveyed by GetYourGuide say cost savings motivate them to pick a destination dupe over the original — 45% among American travellers specifically. Source: GetYourGuide traveller survey, 2026.

Not every pairing on these lists survives contact with an actual itinerary. Some dupes are close enough that you genuinely wouldn't notice the swap. Others share a colour palette and not much else. Worth running each one through the same test before you book: would a photo of this place, with no caption, fool someone who's actually been to the original? For two of the pairings below, it genuinely would. For the third, it wouldn't come close.

Ghent's canals, medieval architecture, and boat-tour layout are close enough to Venice's that the comparison isn't a stretch — the main difference is that Ghent doesn't require booking a hotel eleven months out or paying a day-tripper fee just to walk around. It also isn't sinking, which Venice, structurally speaking, still is.

This is the pairing that falls apart fastest. Bali has beaches, but it also has Ubud's rice terraces, a developed digital nomad scene, and direct flights from most of Asia. Siargao is a surf island with a fraction of Bali's infrastructure and a fraction of its price. If what you wanted was Bali's beach photos, Siargao delivers. If you wanted Bali — the whole trip, not just the beach — Siargao is a different holiday wearing a similar filter.

Jeonju's hanok village — a preserved neighbourhood of traditional Korean houses, tea houses, and narrow lanes — genuinely does what Kyoto's Gion and Higashiyama districts do, minus the crowd control barriers and the queue for a photo outside a temple gate. It's a smaller city with a shorter list of things to do, which cuts both ways: fewer crowds, but also fewer days worth planning around before you've seen what's there. Two or three days in Jeonju covers it properly. Kyoto can absorb a week.

Here's the honest filter: ask yourself whether you were searching for "Venice," or searching for "canals, old stone, a boat ride, an aperitivo." If it's the second one, a dupe will satisfy you completely, usually for a fraction of the total trip cost. If it's the first one — if the point was specifically Venice, the actual city with the actual history — no amount of Ghent is going to scratch that itch, and you'll spend the whole trip mentally comparing it to the original anyway.

There's a second, quieter filter worth applying too: check whether the dupe is being sold to you by someone with a reason to sell it. An eSIM company benefits from more international trips, full stop, regardless of which city you land in. That doesn't make the Ghent-Venice comparison wrong — the canals really are that similar — but it's worth remembering that "destination dupe" is also a content format built to get clicks, the same as every other travel trend headline before it. Judge the specific pairing, not the trend headline.

Ask Vani for a cheaper alternative to a destination and she'll pull up real flight and hotel pricing for both options side by side, so the comparison is your actual total trip cost, not a headline percentage from someone else's index. Say "somewhere like Bali but cheaper" and she'll ask what you actually want from Bali — the beaches, the food scene, the temples, the nightlife — before suggesting anywhere, because that answer changes whether Siargao, Lombok, or somewhere else entirely is the right call.

What she won't do is tell you Siargao is Bali. It isn't, and pretending otherwise is how people end up disappointed by a trip that was never really the problem — the expectation was.

(Nine times out of ten, the traveller who's happiest with a destination dupe is the one who read past the headline before booking.) If a dupe genuinely doesn't fit what you're after, our travel guide hub covers the originals too — sometimes the honest answer is that you did want Venice, day-tripper fee and all.

Ghent isn't trying to be Venice. It's just tired of being compared to Venice in every single article about it, including this one.