I’ve had it with hectic city breaks — now I’m going slow
3 min readHad Isaac Newton been around in the 21st century he might have noted that for every travel trend there is an equal and opposite travel trend.
So on the one hand you have “extreme day tripping” — a craze for going as far away as possible, fitting in as much as you can while you’re there, then scooting home again to be tucked up in your own bed, all within 24 hours.
It generally involves getting up hideously early, travelling on a hand-luggage-only airfare that’s about the same as the cost of a standard pub round and, crucially, not setting foot in a hotel, except possibly to soak up half an hour’s free wi-fi. Sales shopping in New York; lunch in Milan; an exhibition in Oslo? The world is your sleep-deprived oyster. There’s a Facebook group with hundreds of thousands of members — “You can pop to Rome for the day. It’s cheaper than going out in Britain,” one of its admins told the Mirror. And, naturally, it’s big news on TikTok.
On the other, possibly more liver-spotted hand, evidence from a number of travel companies’ reports on 2024 trends suggests that a different group of travellers is turning towards a slower sort of city trip: embracing a place with a modest set of attractions and taking as long as possible to enjoy them — what you could call “moderate mini-breaking”, as long as you were happy that it didn’t have a remotely sexy name.
La Piscine art gallery in Lille
ALAMY
Luton Airport found that 51 per cent of the travellers it surveyed were seeking holidays that allowed them to “disconnect and relax, like a break in the French suburbs”, which sounds quite extreme itself, albeit in a different way. The sustainable-travel specialist Byway noted that “today’s savvy traveller will know that there are canal cities beyond Amsterdam (hello Delft and Utrecht)”.
And the flight-comparison site Skyscanner highlighted trending destinations including the Spanish city of Vigo (where the three top attractions, according to Tripadvisor, are a beach, a park and a boat trip) and Leipzig in Germany (a zoo, a war memorial and its train station) — take that, Barcelona and Berlin! Skyscanner also reported that “more than a third of people say sleep tops their list of holiday activities” — Generation Zzzzz.
My vote goes to the moderates. I agree with Patrick Millar of Kirker Holidays, who says: “There’s a temptation to turn a city break into a marathon of box-ticking, but this is a recipe for an endurance test, not a holiday.” On a recent weekend in Lille with my mum and sister, I was delighted to find that there wasn’t really much to do. Without the pressure of a long list of must-sees, we could relax properly, like you’re supposed to on holiday.
We picked one thing to do each day — the neogothic cathedral on Friday; La Piscine, the beautiful art deco swimming pool turned art gallery, on Saturday; the enormous Wazemmes market on Sunday — and otherwise devoted ourselves to idle wandering, eating and drinking, like Flemish flâneuses. We had to skip the Palais des Beaux Arts, but that was OK — the shops in the old town were good for a browse and the gabled architecture good for a gawp. And we could take our time enjoying a waffle here, a moules-frites and bitters-spiked Picon beer there.
It’s not that I’m tired of London or Paris, or any of the bigger, more bustling cities. I love a thrusting metropolis as much as the next Samuel Johnson. But now that I’m convinced of the merits of the low-maintenance city break I’m going to enjoy some more. On the Eurostar home from Lille we asked Mum where she’d like to go for our next trip. Rome, she suggested. What? I never had her down as an extremist — but perhaps I’ll book her on the 06.35 out of Gatwick.
What’s your favourite city break destination? Let us know in the comments
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