12 Destination Dupes Worth Watching in 2027 (and What You Actually Trade Off)

For years, the travel bucket list has been predictable. Santorini for Greek islands, Venice for canals, Hawaii for volcanic beaches, Iceland for otherworldly landscapes, Kyoto for temples. None of that reputation is undeserved. But prices are climbing, and visitor caps are arriving at the world’s most-photographed places. As a result, more travellers are asking a different question: what if the experience I want exists somewhere else?

That’s the idea behind destination dupes. A dupe isn’t a cheaper copy or a lookalike. It starts with what you actually want from a trip: turquoise water, dramatic mountains, old streets, wildlife, or desert silence. Then it finds another place that delivers it on different terms. This guide covers 12 destination dupes for 2027, along with what you actually trade off with each one.

What are destination dupes?

Destination dupes are alternatives to famous, often overcrowded places. They deliver a similar category of experience (beaches, mountains, history, wildlife, desert) through a different place, culture, and price point. They aren’t visual copies. Corfu doesn’t have Santorini’s caldera, and the Atacama doesn’t have Patagonia’s glaciers. The similarity lies in what the traveller is actually looking for, not in what the place looks like in a photo.

The destination dupes for 2027 at a glance

Note: this table doesn’t imply the two destinations are interchangeable. It only shows that they satisfy a similar underlying craving. Ratios and totals come from national tourism boards, statistical offices, and industry reporting cited throughout. See “What changes” in each section before booking.

Why destination dupes are trending: the data behind it

Destination dupes aren’t just a social trend. Santorini introduced a hard daily cap of 8,000 cruise passengers in 2025. It tightened that cap to full 100% ship-capacity accounting in 2026. Even so, the island’s hotel revenue fell roughly 22% in the first half of 2025 as arrivals dropped.

Even with that pullback, Santorini absorbs an estimated 3.4 million visitors a year. About 15,500 people live there. That ratio is far beyond what the European Commission classifies as overtourism. A cruise passenger fee of up to €20 per person in peak season has also been in effect since July 2025.

Similar visitor caps or crowd-management measures are now in place or under discussion at the Taj Mahal, Dubrovnik, and several Greek islands. This is a global pattern, not just a Mediterranean one. South Korea, Japan, and New Zealand’s Department of Conservation have all flagged the same concentration problem at their most famous sites.

It’s worth flagging honestly that Corfu and the wider Ionian Islands aren’t a hidden secret either. Eurostat’s 2024 regional tourism-saturation data ranks the Ionian Islands as the second most tourism-intensive region in the entire EU. Meanwhile, Corfu’s tourism board reported record numbers in 2024 and continued double-digit growth into 2026. In other words, it’s a dupe in the sense of trading one landscape and crowd pattern for a meaningfully lower one, not an empty island.

Instead of Cancún and the Riviera Maya, try Santa Marta

Cancún and the Riviera Maya, in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, form one of the largest tourism corridors in the world. More than 21 million tourists visited the region in 2023. That figure comes from the Secretaría de Turismo de Quintana Roo (SEDETUR), the state’s official tourism authority. The area has grappled for years with well-documented problems. These include sargassum seaweed on the beaches, pressure on the Mesoamerican Reef, and hotel infrastructure that has turned much of the coastline into a corridor of all-inclusive resorts.

Santa Marta, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, offers the same Caribbean beach appeal and tropical climate, with direct access to Tayrona National Natural Park and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The scale is completely different. According to Colombian tourism industry figures, Santa Marta received only around 60,000 foreign tourists in 2024, just 1% of the country’s total. Meanwhile, Tayrona National Park recorded 545,760 visitors in 2022, according to official Colombian national park data. That’s a fraction of the Riviera Maya’s volume.

Santa Marta doesn’t replicate Cancún’s hotel infrastructure or its party zones for large groups. As destination dupes go, it works for travellers whose real draw was the Caribbean itself: turquoise water, white-sand beaches, and a tropical climate. It’s less suited to anyone who wants an all-inclusive resort.

• • What you still get: Caribbean beaches, turquoise water, year-round tropical climate.

• • What changes: jungle and mountains just minutes from the beach (Tayrona, Sierra Nevada), far less dense tourism infrastructure, Colombian culture instead of the all-inclusive resort formula.

Instead of Venice, try Annecy

Venice’s canals, bridges, and pastel palazzos draw an extreme concentration of visitors. An average of roughly 40,000 people visit each day, nearly matching the historic centre’s own resident population of about 50,000. The city recorded 5.88 million official accommodation arrivals in 2024 alone. The City of Venice’s own access-fee authority now charges day-trippers €5–€10 on peak dates precisely because of that density.

Annecy, in the French Alps, offers the same canal-town appeal, backed by genuine mountain scenery rather than a lagoon. It’s nicknamed “the Venice of the Alps” for its Thiou canal, arcaded old town, and turquoise lake. According to the Office de Tourisme du Lac d’Annecy, the area draws between 1.8 and 3 million visitors a year. About 130,000 people live across the wider lake area. That’s a real crowd, but nowhere near Venice’s daily-visitor-to-resident ratio.

Annecy isn’t on the water in the same way Venice is. There’s no gondola network and no lagoon, and its old town is a fraction of Venice’s size. Even so, among destination dupes it works for travellers whose real draw was canals, arcades, and old-world charm reflected in water, rather than Venice’s specific island geography.

• • What you still get: canals, old stone bridges, arcaded streets, waterside dining.

• • What changes: a mountain lake setting instead of a lagoon, a much smaller historic core, no gondolas, and a strong outdoor and hiking dimension from the surrounding Alps.

Instead of Ibiza, try Puglia

Ibiza is shorthand for Mediterranean summer, but not everyone drawn to that idea wants the superclub scene. The island absorbs 3.3–3.7 million visitors a year. Only about 159,000 people live there permanently, which works out to roughly 21 tourists per resident. All of them are concentrated on a 572 km² island, and peak summer days push the ratio far higher.

Puglia, the region forming the heel of Italy’s boot, offers the same turquoise Adriatic and Ionian coastline and long, easy summer evenings. The focus, however, is on whitewashed hill towns and centuries-old farmhouses rather than beach clubs. Think of Ostuni’s “White City,” the conical trulli of Alberobello, and the Baroque limestone streets of Lecce.

According to Puglia’s regional government, citing Italy’s national statistics institute (ISTAT), the region recorded about 5.9 million arrivals and 20.7 million overnight stays in 2024. About 3.9 million people live there, a ratio of roughly 1.5 tourists per resident. That’s far below Ibiza’s intensity, since Puglia is an entire mainland region rather than one small island.

Puglia doesn’t have Ibiza’s nightlife scene or its single-island identity. It works for travellers whose real draw was the Mediterranean lifestyle: warm water, long evenings, and good food. It’s less suited to anyone who wants the clubs.

• • What you still get: turquoise Mediterranean water, whitewashed towns, beach days, lively evenings out.

• • What changes: food and architecture take centre stage over nightlife, the trip spans several distinct towns rather than one island, and olive groves and trulli farmhouses replace beach clubs.

Instead of the classic South African safari, try Namibia

South Africa combines wildlife with cities, coast, and wine country. Its flagship Kruger National Park draws record numbers: 1.7 million visitors in 2025, according to South African National Parks (SANParks), the official park authority. Day visitors now make up more than two-thirds of that total.

Namibia strips safari down to wildlife plus enormous, empty landscapes. Etosha National Park is similar in size to Kruger (roughly 22,000 km² versus 20,000 km²). It sees closer to 200,000 visitors a year. That figure comes from older Namibian government reporting rather than a recent official update, so treat it as directional. Meanwhile, the Namib Desert and Sossusvlei make the scenery as memorable as the animals.

South Africa is still the stronger pick for anyone wanting that specific combination of safari, cities, and coast. Namibia trades that breadth for wilderness and distance.

• • What you still get: wildlife, national parks, safari game drives.

• • What changes: desert scenery, long driving distances, a stronger road-trip character.

Instead of Morocco, try Tunisia

Morocco draws travellers with medinas, markets, and desert landscapes, especially around Marrakech and Fez. Its tourism numbers reflect it: 19.8 million international visitors in 2025, according to Morocco’s Ministry of Tourism. That makes it Africa’s most-visited country for the second year running.

Tunisia offers historic medinas alongside Roman archaeological sites, Mediterranean beaches, and its own desert landscapes. It draws around 10 million visitors, roughly half Morocco’s volume. Tunisia isn’t a copy of Marrakech. Among destination dupes, it’s a different way into North Africa for travellers whose interest was never one specific city.

• • What you still get: North African culture, medinas, markets, desert.

• • What changes: Roman heritage, Tunisian cuisine, a stronger Mediterranean coastal element.

Instead of the Caribbean’s biggest names, try Belize

Barbados, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Saint Lucia dominate the Caribbean conversation. The region drew an estimated 34.2 million international arrivals in 2024, according to the Caribbean Tourism Organization, the region’s intergovernmental tourism body. The Dominican Republic alone took 8.5 million, and Jamaica took 2.9 million.

Belize, a CARICOM member on the Caribbean coast of Central America, offers the same warm-water, reef, and beach appeal at a fraction of the scale. The Belize Tourism Board recorded a record 562,405 overnight visitors in 2024, roughly a fifth of Jamaica’s volume. Those visitors spread across the mainland, the barrier reef cayes, and inland Maya ruins rather than concentrating in beachfront resort strips.

Belize also adds the Belize Barrier Reef (the second-largest barrier reef system in the world, including the Great Blue Hole) and Maya ruins in the Cayo and Toledo districts. As a result, the trip has a stronger diving and archaeology dimension than a typical resort-island stay.

• • What you still get: warm Caribbean water, reef diving and snorkelling, beach relaxation.

• • What changes: a more low-key, less resort-dense feel, a bigger role for diving and Maya archaeological sites, and English as the official language rather than Spanish or a local creole.

Instead of Patagonia, try Chile’s Atacama Desert

Patagonia’s appeal is scale: glaciers, isolation, and adventure. Its best-known park, Torres del Paine, draws roughly 250,000–300,000 visitors a year. That’s a moderate figure by global standards, but it’s concentrated into a short November–April season.

The Atacama Desert delivers that same feeling of scale through an entirely different landscape: salt flats, volcanoes, and high-altitude lagoons, without a single glacier in sight. San Pedro de Atacama, its main gateway town, sees comparable visitor volumes. This is the clearest example among destination dupes that a dupe doesn’t need to solve a crowding problem to be worth choosing. Both places satisfy the same craving for remoteness and scale through opposite scenery. Neither is currently under the kind of visitor-cap pressure seen in Greece or Japan.

• • What you still get: vast landscapes, remoteness, adventure.

• • What changes: desert and volcanoes instead of glaciers and southern mountains.

Instead of Bali, try El Nido, Palawan

Bali blends beaches, temples, wellness culture, and nightlife with a large international visitor base. It recorded 6.95 million foreign arrivals in 2025, plus another 26.6 million domestic trips.

El Nido, on the Philippine island of Palawan, offers a comparable tropical package of limestone cliffs, hidden lagoons, and white-sand beaches. It has far less of the restaurant, yoga, and digital-nomad infrastructure that now defines parts of Bali. According to the Philippines’ Department of Tourism, which tracks arrivals through its regional tourism offices, El Nido set a record with 500,408 visitors in 2023. That’s a small fraction of Bali’s volume, even as the broader Palawan province saw arrivals nearly double that year.

El Nido is the wrong choice for someone who wants Bali’s social scene and hospitality variety. It’s the right choice for someone who wants the tropical island experience without the lifestyle industry built around it.

• • What you still get: tropical beaches, warm water, dramatic limestone scenery, island-hopping.

• • What changes: far less nightlife and wellness infrastructure, a smaller and more remote set of towns, less English-language digital-nomad culture.

Instead of Hawaii, try the Azores

Hawaii delivers volcanic landscapes, waterfalls, and Pacific beaches at serious scale. It welcomed 9.7 million visitors in 2024, according to the Hawaii Tourism Authority and the state’s Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. About 1.4 million people live there. Single sites like Haleakalā and Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park each absorb roughly 1 million visitors a year on their own.

The Azores, Portugal’s volcanic archipelago in the mid-Atlantic, offer a similar mix of volcanic craters, crater lakes, waterfalls, and hiking trails spread across nine islands. The Azores Regional Statistics Service (SREA) recorded a record 4.3 million overnight stays and about 1.2 million guests in 2024. Roughly 236,000 people live there. That’s still a meaningful tourism intensity, but on a different scale, and it’s spread across an archipelago rather than concentrated on a handful of famous trails.

The Azores don’t have Hawaii’s surf culture or size. They work for travellers whose real draw is volcanic scenery, hiking, and dramatic coastline rather than Hawaii specifically.

• • What you still get: volcanic landscapes, crater lakes, waterfalls, hiking, dramatic coastline.

• • What changes: Portuguese and Atlantic culture rather than Polynesian and Pacific, a cooler and rainier climate, no surf culture, and a trip spread across several smaller islands rather than concentrated on a few.

Instead of Kyoto, try Gyeongju, South Korea

Kyoto draws travellers for temples, traditional architecture, and centuries of Japanese history. It’s commonly cited as receiving around 50 million visitors a year. That volume has pushed the city to introduce express tourist buses and manners campaigns to manage congestion at its major temples.

Gyeongju, former capital of the Silla Kingdom, offers Bulguksa Temple, Seokguram Grotto, the royal tombs of Daereungwon, and Donggung Palace. That’s a comparable density of historic sites in a South Korean setting, with a fraction of the traffic. About 8–9 million people visit each year, most of them domestic.

The connection isn’t Korea standing in for Japan. Instead, both places satisfy the same desire to spend days immersed in temples and ancient history, through distinct cultures. Gyeongju also pairs naturally with Seoul or Busan for a fuller itinerary.

• • What you still get: temples, traditional architecture, archaeological sites.

• • What changes: Korean rather than Japanese heritage, more dispersed historic sites.

Instead of India’s Golden Triangle, try Sri Lanka’s Cultural Triangle

The Taj Mahal anchors India’s most-travelled circuit (Delhi, Agra, Jaipur). It remains the country’s most visited monument, with 6.9 million visitors in FY2024–25, per India’s Ministry of Tourism. A daily cap of 40,000 visitors in peak season is already in place to manage crowding.

Sri Lanka’s Cultural Triangle offers Sigiriya’s rock fortress, the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, and the ancient capitals of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa. That’s a comparable density of world-class heritage sites. The whole country welcomed just over 2 million international visitors in 2024, according to the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority. That’s a fraction of what a single Indian monument absorbs on its own.

Sri Lanka isn’t a substitute for the Taj Mahal specifically, because nothing else looks like it. However, it satisfies the same underlying pull toward centuries-old architecture and monumental heritage sites, without the single-monument bottleneck.

• • What you still get: ancient architecture, UNESCO World Heritage sites, a dense heritage circuit.

• • What changes: Buddhist and Sinhalese history rather than Mughal, no single monument as globally iconic as the Taj, easier access without daily caps.

Instead of Dubrovnik, try Berat and Gjirokastër, Albania

Dubrovnik’s draw is stone streets and fortified architecture inside a remarkably preserved historic city. It currently has the highest tourist-to-resident ratio of any city in Europe: around 1.39 million annual visitors against roughly 41,000 residents, or about 27 tourists per resident. Authorities now cap cruise arrivals at two ships and 5,000 passengers a day to manage the Old Town’s congestion. Croatia’s own national statistics office tracks Dubrovnik among the country’s top destinations for foreign overnight stays.

Albania’s Berat and Gjirokastër, a joint UNESCO World Heritage site since 2005, offer a different but comparable pull: hillside stone towns with Ottoman-era architecture, historic castles, and cobblestone streets climbing steep hillsides. Albania as a whole logged over 12 million visitors in 2025, according to the national statistics agency INSTAT. That traffic concentrates heavily on the Albanian Riviera coastline. Berat and Gjirokastër together draw only in the hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, split across two separate towns rather than funnelled into one walled seaside city.

It’s worth being precise here: this isn’t a coastal walled-city match the way Dubrovnik itself is. Berat and Gjirokastër are inland hill towns built around Ottoman-era stone houses and hilltop fortresses, not Venetian sea walls. The similarity is in the historic-townscape density and castle-and-cobblestone atmosphere, not an identical setting.

• • What you still get: hilltop fortresses, dense historic old towns, cobblestone streets, centuries of layered architecture.

• • What changes: Ottoman rather than Venetian history, an inland hillside setting instead of a walled seaside city, two smaller towns to explore instead of one concentrated Old Town.

How to choose between destination dupes

Before searching for an alternative, forget the destination name and ask three questions:

1. 1. What am I actually travelling for? Beach, scenery, architecture, food, wildlife, desert, nightlife, or just the feeling of being somewhere new?

1. 1. What am I willing to give up? No dupe reproduces everything. Corfu doesn’t have Santorini’s caldera. The Atacama doesn’t have Patagonia’s glaciers. The Azores don’t have Hawaii’s surf culture.

1. 1. What do I want to gain? Better value, more space, a different culture, or a destination that still feels new?

The answer might lead you straight back to the famous original. It might also take you somewhere you hadn’t considered.

The overcrowding trap: when destination dupes become hotspots

There’s one obvious risk with this trend: today’s dupe can become tomorrow’s overcrowded hotspot. Corfu and the Ionian Islands are a live example. They’re already the second most tourism-saturated EU region on a nights-per-resident basis. Redirecting everyone from one famous island to the same “secret” alternative doesn’t solve overtourism. It just relocates it.

The more useful takeaway isn’t “go to Corfu instead of Santorini.” Instead, there are dozens of Greek islands, Alpine regions, historic cities, and desert coastlines. The more of that map travellers actually use, the less pressure lands on any single place. Spreading out is what makes destination dupes work.

Frequently asked questions

What are destination dupes?

Destination dupes are alternative places that satisfy the same core travel motivation as a famous destination (beaches, mountains, history, wildlife, desert). They don’t necessarily look like it or cost the same.

Is Corfu cheaper than Santorini?

Generally yes for accommodation and dining. Corfu is a larger island with a much bigger year-round population and hospitality base. However, prices rise sharply in the Venetian old town and popular resort areas during peak summer weeks.

Do destination dupes solve overtourism?

Not by themselves. Shifting crowds from one famous destination to a single “alternative” just moves the pressure. The benefit comes from spreading visitors across many options, not concentrating them on a new favourite.

Are these destination dupes visually identical to the originals?

No. Some, like Corfu and Santorini, are both Greek islands but look almost nothing alike: one is volcanic and whitewashed, the other green and Venetian. Others, like the Atacama and Patagonia, or Hawaii and the Azores, differ in climate and culture. They match on the underlying experience (scale, remoteness, volcanic scenery) rather than exact appearance.