Choosing the right city could cut the cost of your next holiday by as much as two-thirds. Skyscanner has crunched flight and hotel pricing data to name its best-value destinations for 2027, and one Spanish city has run away with the top spot.
Bilbao saw economy return fares drop 66% compared with the previous year, while hotel rates fell 63%. That makes the largest city in Spain's Basque Country unusually cheap right now, which is good news for anyone who has been putting off a trip. The Guggenheim Museum is the headline act, but the real pleasure here is grazing your way between bars for pintxos — the Basque take on small bites — washed down with a glass of local txakoli.
Wrocław in Poland takes second place, with flights down 47% and hotels cheaper than in the country's bigger-name cities. It's a city with more than a thousand years of history: Cathedral Island still glows with gas lanterns after dark, and the UNESCO-listed Centennial Hall is a landmark of early reinforced-concrete architecture. Add in the market square and the city's scattering of small bronze dwarf statues, and you have plenty to fill a long weekend.
Third-placed Bordeaux will please wine lovers — airfares are down by about a third and hotel rates by 9%. More surprising is Zürich in fourth: a city better known for eye-watering prices saw fares drop 33% and hotel costs 13%, making it a rare window to visit Switzerland on something like a normal budget. Ancona on Italy's Adriatic coast rounds out the top five, with flights down 31% and hotels 13% cheaper.
The wider list rewards travellers willing to look past the obvious. Rhodes in Greece (-22%), Pula in Croatia (-20%) and Carcassonne in France (-20%) all feature, as does Fez in Morocco (-19%) and Krabi in Thailand (-15%), a useful nudge that long-haul value exists too.
A note on how the rankings work: Skyscanner compared economy return fares booked in the first half of the year for travel across 2026 with the same period a year earlier, and factored accommodation prices into the final picture. The method favours booking early — the price drops are based on advance bookings for travel through the year.
For holidaymakers still travelling frequently despite the cost of living squeeze, the takeaway is simple: swapping a pricier favourite for one of these cities can fund an extra break. Skyscanner's CEO Bryan Batista noted that travellers are increasingly intentional about where they go and how they book, with some even turning to AI during planning. Whether or not you use a chatbot, picking a destination where prices are genuinely falling is one of the easiest ways to make your budget stretch further in 2027.
Story via Euronews Travel
