[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

The 'Detour Destinations' Trend Sends You to the Ugly Cousin City — and It's Better

The trend of 2026 is going to the city nobody brags about — the industrial, slightly grim, unglamorous one next door. I ranked the best ugly cousins, and yeah, they're winning.

There’s a name now for the thing I’ve been doing for years out of pure cheapness: detour destinations 2026. The idea is you skip — or at least don’t center — the postcard city, and go instead to its plain, slightly grubby, often industrial cousin. The one travel writers used to call “worth a day if you’re stuck there.” Turns out the ugly cousin grew up interesting. And I’ve got a ranking, because of course I do.

Let me explain why this works before I start handing out medals. Famous cities optimize for visitors. Everything’s a bit performed, a bit priced-up, a bit polished for the photo. The second city has no such pressure. It’s just being itself — making things, fixing things, occasionally being a bit of a dump in a way that’s honestly refreshing. And because nobody flies in just for it, the prices stayed sane. So here we go, ranked by how hard they made me fall for them.

Everyone does Bruges, that gorgeous chocolate-box place, and Bruges is lovely and also basically a film set with a gift shop attached. Antwerp is the working diamond port that happens to be a fashion capital, has a train station so beautiful people gasp walking in (genuinely, it’s called the “railway cathedral” and it earns it), and a food and bar scene with actual edge. Less cute. Way more alive. The cathedral’s Rubens paintings are right there and you won’t queue an hour for them.

People have been calling Leipzig “the new Berlin” for years, which is annoying and also sort of true. The old cotton-mill district, Spinnerei, is now studios and galleries. Bach worked here — you can sit in the Thomaskirche where he’s buried for free and it’s quietly moving. Rents and pints cost a fraction of Berlin, the nightlife is filthy in the good way, and it has none of Berlin’s slightly exhausting self-importance. I liked it more than I expected to. A lot more.

Amsterdam is canals and crowds and a city visibly tired of stag parties. Rotterdam got flattened in the war and rebuilt itself as this bold, weird, vertical experiment — wild architecture, the Markthal food hall that’s worth the trip alone, a harbour you can feel working around you. It’s the least “quaint” city in the Netherlands and that’s exactly why I love it. No clogs-and-tulips theatre. Just a real, modern, slightly brash place getting on with it. Cheaper than Amsterdam by a mile, too.

Top of my list, and here’s why it deserves it. Bilbao was a declining, grimy industrial port — a genuinely rough steel-and-shipping town — until the Guggenheim landed in 1997 and the whole city reinvented itself around it. That’s the dream version of this trend made real. Now you’ve got the titanium swoop of the Guggenheim, the old town’s pintxos bars where you eat standing up for a few euros a bite (go to Calle del Perro, point at things, drink txakoli, repeat), and the green Basque hills right there. It out-charms cities ten times more famous and most people still treat it as a stopover. Their loss.

I’m not going to oversell this. Some of these places are, in patches, genuinely not pretty. Rotterdam has stretches of concrete that’ll never end up on a calendar. Leipzig has grey corners. The “ugly cousin” framing is half a joke but only half. If your idea of a perfect trip is cobbles and a cathedral square in every direction, the second city will sometimes let you down, and you should know that going in.

But that plainness is the deal you’re making, and it pays. You get a place that isn’t curating itself for you. You get locals who aren’t sick of tourists because there aren’t enough tourists to be sick of. You get to eat well for cheap and walk into things without booking. And weirdly, you come home with stories nobody else has, because nobody else bothered to go.

The famous city will always be there, polished and waiting and overpriced. The ugly cousin is having its moment right now, before everyone catches on and ruins it (which, fair warning, is already happening to Bilbao and Leipzig). Go take the detour while it’s still a detour.

Book the unglamorous one. The pretty cousin’s just a day trip — and it’ll be relieved when you leave anyway.

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