Skip the Crowds This Spring Break: Why Savvy Travelers Are Trading Capitals for Hidden Gems

Spring break doesn’t have to mean fighting for a barstool in Barcelona or elbowing through the Louvre. A growing number of Americans are going deeper into Europe this season – and spending less doing it.

According to Omio’s NowNext 2025–2026 report, nearly one-fifth of American travelers say they’re actively seeking out lesser-known destinations, motivated by lower prices, fewer crowds, and more authentic local experiences. The booking data backs it up: travel to secondary cities on Omio’s platform is up 30% year-over-year.

But the real story is these aren’t hard-to-reach places. The trick is to use trains, buses, and ferries to pair a major hub with a secondary gem: from Madrid, hop on a train to Salamanca, Segovia, or Valladolid, Spain; fly into Bari, the second largest city in southern Italy, and take a short train ride to Monopoli, Polignano a Mare or Alberobello; or travel to Antwerp or Ghent, Belgium by train or bus from Brussels.

Not sure where to start? Gone are the days of cross-referencing schedules across multiple sites. Multi-modal booking platforms like Omio are genuine trip-shapers that surface price comparisons across all transport modes, including regional carriers that don’t show up on major booking sites, and handle booking and management in one place, in one’s preferred language and currency. The friction that once kept travelers anchored to the obvious capitals is largely gone.

A few more ways the Omio app saves time and money:

• Book multi-city one-way routes. Florence–Pisa–Rome or Madrid–Seville–Granada cover more ground in a single booking and often cost less than a roundtrip to one city.
• Take overnight trains to cut down on hotel costs. Routes like Munich–Prague and Bratislava–Vienna double as accommodations and cover ground while you sleep.
• Add ferries to the mix. Coastal routes like Naples–Sorrento, Dubrovnik–Split, and Amalfi Coast island hops are often cheaper than equivalent trains.
• Use capitals as gateways, not endpoints. Pair a big-city flight deal with a secondary destination that actually delivers the experience you’re after, such as London to Oxford, Barcelona to Tossa de Mar, or Madrid to Salamanca.
• Eastern Europe deserves a particular callout. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic offer world-class history and culture at a fraction of Western European prices, and they’re highly connected by rail. Travelers who build itineraries around these countries often find they can significantly extend the length of their trip on the same budget.

Spring is the perfect testing ground for a smarter way to travel, one that trades iconic for authentic and busy for memorable. With secondary cities easier to reach than ever and the savings hard to ignore, the only real question is why it took this long.