Europe is hot, crowded and quietly rationing itself. The smartest travellers are changing their dates rather than their destination.
July 2026 · Lifestyle
Somewhere in Europe this week, a woman is standing in a queue that snakes around a piazza in thirty-eight degrees of heat, holding a phone above her head, waiting to photograph a fountain she can no longer see. She has spent a good deal of money to be there, she booked it in January, when the whole idea shimmered brightly.
I have been that woman. I suspect you have too.
The thing we were all chasing
Here is what makes it faintly absurd and rather sad. Every single person in that queue chose the destination for the same reason: they wanted somewhere beautiful, somewhere authentic, somewhere the guidebooks promised felt like the real Italy, the real Greece, the real anywhere. And the pursuit of that quality by several hundred thousand people simultaneously is the precise mechanism by which the quality is destroyed.
An economist called Fred Hirsch gave this its proper name back in 1977. He called them positional goods — things whose entire value depends on other people not having them. A degree from a rare university. A house with a view. A quiet beach. You cannot mass-produce a quiet beach, because the moment the crowd arrives, the good you were buying has evaporated. Everyone gets in; nobody gets what they came for.
That, in one tidy phrase, is overtourism; it isn’t badly behaved tourists. It is caused by all of us wanting the identical, entirely reasonable thing, at the identical, entirely reasonable moment.
What is actually changing
The evidence suggests people have noticed. A Skyscanner survey found roughly a third of travellers had experienced the downside of overcrowding first-hand, and about the same proportion were now actively hunting for quieter places. The European Travel Commission reports that more than a quarter of Europe’s travellers intend to shift when they go over the next two years, chiefly to escape the crush.
Meanwhile, the destinations themselves have stopped asking nicely. Venice continues to charge day-trippers on its busiest days. France has reinstated reservations and daily visitor limits at the Calanques, the ravishing limestone inlets between Marseille and Cassis. Spain has introduced some of the broadest measures in Europe. The mood has changed from please come to please come, but not all at once, and possibly not in August.
And then there is the heat, which is no longer a footnote. Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth, and this year has already delivered two significant heatwaves, with records falling across France, Britain, Spain and Switzerland in late June. A great many charming old European buildings were designed by people who had never heard of air conditioning and had no reason to.
The luxury nobody can buy
Which brings us to the most interesting development in travel, and the reason I wanted to write to you about it.
The definition of a luxury holiday is quietly changing. It used to mean thread count and a marble bathroom. It now means space — a stretch of coastline with nobody else on it, a table at the family trattoria on a Tuesday because the locals still outnumber the visitors, a cathedral you can stand inside and actually think in.
Notice what that costs. Not money, particularly. It costs flexibility. The ability to go in late September rather than the first fortnight of August is worth more, in ordinary human happiness, than upgrading your room. And flexibility is precisely what financial independence buys you — not a better hotel, but the freedom to arrive on a Wednesday in the shoulder season because nothing in your life demands otherwise.
I would go further. Time, not money, is the currency in which the finest holidays are bought. This is the same reason I have always insisted that the long lunch is a power move rather than an indulgence, and the same instinct behind collecting experiences rather than objects. Nobody has ever come home from a fortnight abroad and reminisced fondly about the minibar.
Let me be honest, though
I am not going to sit here and pretend I have solved this, because I have two small children and a school calendar that has opinions about my summer.
There is a slight smugness in the shoulder-season conversation that I want to name, because it is real. The people who can travel in October are, disproportionately, the people without children in school, or with jobs that permit it, or with enough money to absorb the cost of choosing. Telling a family with a fixed six-week window to go in May is not advice. It is a small act of gloating dressed up as wisdom.
So here is the version I actually believe, and does it work, whatever your constraints.
If your dates are fixed, move your hours. The famous viewpoint at seven in the morning is a completely different place from the same viewpoint at noon, and it is free. If your dates are fixed, move your radius — Intrepid reckons four-fifths of travellers cram into a tenth of the world’s destinations, which means the next valley along is very often empty and just as beautiful. And whatever your dates, move your pace: two bases rather than four, one afternoon deliberately left unplanned, permission to sit somewhere ordinary and watch the light change.
What I’d take from all this
The travel industry will happily sell you the queue and call it an experience. It has a strong commercial interest in your believing that the destination is the product.
It isn’t. The product was always the feeling — of space, of unhurriedness, of being somewhere rather than merely having been there. And that feeling turns out to be surprisingly indifferent to the postcode. It responds to the calendar, to the clock, and to your own willingness to want something slightly different from what everybody else wants at the same time.
Which is, when you think about it, the whole of the good life in miniature. Not going where nobody goes. Just going when nobody else is going, and staying long enough to notice you have arrived.
This is me thinking out loud in your company — a reflection, not advice. Where you decide to go, and when, is gloriously your own affair.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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