If you'd rather not queue for two hours to see a crowded landmark next year, Intrepid Travel has just handed you ten alternatives. The tour operator's annual 'Not Hot List', running since 2018, flags lesser-visited destinations that have the hotels, transport and infrastructure to welcome more tourists — and where your money actually helps locals rather than squeezing them out.

Topping the 2027 edition is Kenya's Samburu National Reserve, pitched as a calmer swap for East Africa's safari heavyweights like Tanzania's Serengeti and Kenya's own Maasai Mara. You get the wildlife without the convoy of 4x4s circling a single lion.

Europe gets three entries. Alonnisos, in Greece's Northern Sporades archipelago, is a ferry-only island that drew just 70,000 visitors in 2024 — a rounding error compared with Santorini or Mykonos. Its big draw is underwater: the National Marine Park of Alonnisos and Northern Sporades is Europe's largest marine protected area, and the Peristera shipwreck is Greece's first underwater museum. Non-divers get a handsome old town, Chora, and some of the continent's best beaches.

Liepāja in Latvia is another pick, and the timing is no accident: it's a European Capital of Culture for 2027, with more than 500 events planned across the year. Add an eight-kilometre beach and it doubles as a cool, northern alternative to a Mediterranean summer break.

Sweden's Dalsland rounds out the European trio. Known as Sweden's Lake District, it has over 2,000 lakes and 850 kilometres of gravel biking roads, and a new rail link between Malmö and Oslo that opened in June makes it far easier to reach. Intrepid's own take is that the appeal isn't any single sight — it's slow travel and a kind of quiet freedom that's hard to find these days.

The rest of the list is pleasingly scattered: Mestia in Georgia, Jordan's Northern Highlands, Whitehorse in Canada's Yukon, Dili in Timor-Leste, Sri Lanka's Pekoe Trail and Chile's Carretera Austral. Between them they cover safaris, mountain treks, cold-water coasts and long-distance road trips — proof that stepping off the well-worn route doesn't mean compromising on the holiday itself.

Intrepid's general manager of experiences, Erica Kritikides, frames the list as a way of shifting how we think about where we go: tourism can be a force for good, but only if travellers actively choose places that can absorb the visitors. For anyone planning 2027 trips, that's a useful filter — pick one of these ten and you'll likely spend less, queue less and do more good along the way.

Full story via Euronews Travel.