World Tourism Day: Surge in Day Trip Bookings Shows Tourists are Adapting to Overcrowding

New data from the destination marketplace and tour operator The Tour Guy shows day trip bookings up 110.7% year over year, as travellers are adapting to crowded popular destinations by getting out of the city.

As the travel industry approaches World Tourism Day – this weekend, on 27th September - the trend of the day trips emerges as clearly as ever. A recent survey by The Tour Guy found that 85.4% of travellers opt for day trips when visiting a destination. They move beyond the Colosseum, the Louvre, or the Uffizi to explore what lies just outside city limits.

The finding lines up with booking data. Day trips on The Tour Guy platform are up 110.7% year over year in 2026. The pattern is clear: tourists are adapting to crowded popular destinations by getting out of the city.

Some 64.9% of respondents declare they like day trips because they’re curious to see the countryside, seaside, and natural landscapes beyond the city borders. On the other hand, 53.4% of respondents already know a precise attraction outside the city and want to visit that specifically. A very limited number of travellers – 8.5% - simply want to take a break from visiting a city.

People search for innovation, as one in every four day trips sold this year comes from new experiences that weren’t available in 2025. None of them are new destinations, though. They are new ways of experiencing places travellers already knew. One of them is the new archaeologist tour in Pompeii, a widely known destination for international travellers. 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. In the Italian region of Chianti, a tour once folded into a broader Tuscany itinerary is now dedicated entirely to wineries. Same destinations, sharper focus.

The pattern of looking for new experiences in recognizable destinations is consistent. The three fastest-growing day trips are also among the most recognizable names. The trip to Sintra from Lisbon and the visit to the Tuscany villages from Rome, for instance, have registered a quadruple-digit growth in bookings. The 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.

“Ahead of World Tourism Day, travellers are telling us something very clearly: tourism doesn’t end at the city gates,” said Sean Finelli, CEO and Co-Founder of The Tour Guy. “Day trips represent a huge opportunity for the whole travel industry, as they allow to create new experiences starting from what people already know. Recognition and innovation represent the magic formula to make travellers book.”

Millions of travellers will land in Europe on this World Tourism Day. What The Tour Guy's numbers suggest is that their next big destination might already be on the map, just waiting for someone to look at it differently.

Methodology: The 85% figure is drawn from a survey conducted among 107,000 travellers who visited Europe in the past 12 months, fielded by The Tour Guy between 7th and 14th September 2026. Booking figures referenced in this release cover January 1 to September 15, 2026, compared to the same period in 2025 (STLY). Across both the survey and the booking data, a day trip is defined as a guided tour departing from a major European city to a destination reachable in the timespan of a single day.