by Mia Taylor
Last updated: 3:15 PM ET, Wed September 23, 2026
Raise your hand if you make it a habit to explore beyond the boundaries of major cities when visiting a new destination.
I certainly do. During my family’s last visit to Rome, Italy, for instance, we took a train two hours south of The Eternal City for a fascinating day of exploring Pompeii, which was famously buried by the ash of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.
During another recent trip, this one to Japan, my son and I took the train to explore a variety of lesser-known areas beyond the popular tourist haunts of Kyoto and Tokyo. We spent one particularly interesting day visiting Uji, a region south of Kyoto known for producing some of Japan’s highest-quality matcha and green tea.
It turns out these sorts of day trips off the beaten path (long part of my family’s travel habits), are growing in popularity among globetrotters.
A survey conducted in early September by The Tour Guy, a provider of curated tours and immersive travel experiences across Europe, found that 85.4% of travelers opt for day trips when visiting a destination.
The Tour Guy’s survey findings also line up with the tour company’s own booking data. Day trips on The Tour Guy platform, for instance, are up 110.7% year-over-year in 2026.
The takeaway, according to experts at The Tour Guy, is that a growing number of explorers are consciously moving beyond tourism hotspots like the Colosseum in Rome or the Louvre in Paris, in order to explore what lies outside city limits.
“Tourists are adapting to crowded popular destinations by getting out of the city,” the company said in a press release about the rise of day trips.
Additional data from the survey, which was conducted amongst travelers who visited Europe over the past 12 months, further underscores the growing popularity of day trips:
- 64.9% of respondents declare they like day trips because they’re curious to see the countryside, seaside, and natural landscapes beyond city borders.
- 53.4% of respondents already know a precise attraction outside the city and want to visit that specifically.
- A smaller number of travelers – 8.5% - said they view day trips as a way to simply take a break from visiting a city.
What types of day trips are travelers looking for?
So where are travelers heading on all of their day trips? According to The Tour Guy’s report, consumers are searching for innovation. This assumption is based on the fact that one in every four day trips sold by The Tour Guy this year comes from new experiences that weren't available in 2025.
“None of them are new destinations, though,” the company says.“They are new ways of experiencing places travelers already knew. One of them is the new archaeologist tour in Pompeii, a widely known destination for international travelers. It gives a twist to the traditional visit by pairing the ruins with the geology of Mt. Vesuvius, guided by an archaeologist and a volcanologist.”
Meanwhile, in the Italian region of Chianti, a tour once folded into a broader Tuscany itinerary is now dedicated entirely to wineries. In both cases, the new day trips take travelers to already popular destinations, but do so with tours that offer a sharper focus.
This pattern of seeking new experiences in recognizable destinations is consistent across The Tour Guy's offerings. The platform’s three fastest-growing day trips are also among the most recognizable names.
A trip to Sintra from Lisbon and a visit to the Tuscany villages from Rome, for instance, have registered a quadruple-digit growth in bookings. Separately, a trip to Mont-Saint-Michel from Paris follows closely as the third fastest-growing day trip.
“While familiarity earns the first click, the experience itself is what drives people's decisions,” says the company.
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