For decades, the global travel imagination has been engineered around capital cities and their high-gloss shorthand. Paris equals romance, London equals heritage, Tokyo equals futurism and New York, well, New York’s just always at the top thanks to all the movies they make about the glamorous city. But the post-pandemic traveller has learned what the tourism industry practically refused to acknowledge.
In Paris, you pay €20 for a mediocre cocktail; in Plovdiv, you pay €4 for a good one and talk to the person who made it. Value isn’t cheapness, it’s quality relative to cost, and travellers are recalibrating. And no, this isn’t the budget backpacker or the postcard collector. This is a generation of travellers who want to travel to sharpen their worldview and not just give them that extra like on Instagram.
Bye bye big monuments that history hyped up. Hello culture, creative community and a place where cafés, bars, and galleries are built not as hospitality assets, but as a space for local expression. Artists, entrepreneurs, and restaurateurs have been leaving capitals for smaller cities where rent doesn’t erase risk. In their wake, they build ecosystems, micro-bakeries, performance venues, design studios which in turn become cultural anchors.
So, let Emily go to Paris (or Rome now). You tick off these top destinations in 2026.
