Americans Are All Over Europe This Summer. Here’s How to Outsmart the Crowds.
Expect even more tourists than usual in the U.K., Italy, France and wherever Taylor Swift is performing
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Who’s headed to Europe this summer? You and everybody else.
This year is shaping up to be a record one for American tourism to the Continent. The first five months of this year saw nearly 7% more trips by U.S. citizens to Europe compared with 2023, according to air traffic data from the International Trade Administration.
The crowds have continued as summer has officially kicked off. The top destinations from the U.S. to Europe this season are London, Rome, Paris, Athens and Amsterdam, according to ticket-sale data from Airlines Reporting Corp.
The European leg of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour and the Summer Olympics in Paris have given U.S. travellers extra reasons to visit. And airlines have added dozens of nonstop flights as travellers prioritise vacations abroad.
Travel executives and advisers gave the following tips to save money and headaches this summer:
Forget spontaneity
To combat the influx of visitors, major attractions like the Louvre museum have set daily visitor limits. Venice charges a five-euro fee for day-trippers on certain days through July 14, and the Acropolis in Athens now requires travellers to purchase tickets with predetermined entry times.
Travellers who don’t plan ahead can miss out on these sites, says Nora Blum, vice president at Travel Leaders in Maple Grove, Minn. “People love thinking they want to be free and to go with the flow,” but that’s inadvisable, she says.
While you’re purchasing ahead of time, Blum suggests looking into skip-the-line passes for popular attractions. They cost more but save time.
Don’t give up if the biggest draws are sold out. Instead, check for promotions from the city. In Spain, passes to the Alhambra fortress in Granada sell out quickly. But the city sells a tourist pass that guarantees entry to some of the most popular monuments, as well as trips on public transit.
Barcelona, Rome and the Greek island of Santorini are among the destinations with popular cruise ports. They list scheduled cruise arrivals and the number of passengers on board. Checking the schedule, even if you’re not on a cruise, can help you plan your day to avoid long waits and big crowds, says Margi Arnold, owner of Creative Travel Adventures in Denver.
She suggests getting up early to visit the most popular attractions or traveling to areas that are harder to reach during day trips.
Dinner reservations often make sense in crowded tourist cities, especially for families or larger groups. Some veteran travelers recommend downloading WhatsApp. Many restaurants will correspond over the free messaging app regarding reservations.
Prep for disruptions
It’s common for rail and airport workers to strike . These actions are announced in advance, so travel advisers suggest checking schedules ahead of time to see how you might be affected.
Regardless of strikes, delays can occur because of air-traffic control, weather or other scheduling issues. Before you depart, download relevant apps for flights and trains and sign up for alerts so schedule changes don’t catch you off-guard.
International airports are no place for cutting it close, since options for expedited security screening are limited. Travellers can reserve a time to go through security at six international airports through Clear Reserve , a free service. London Heathrow and Frankfurt Airport in Germany are some of the airports that take reservations.
And read up on rules for liquids. Heathrow requires travellers to remove liquids and put them in clear, resealable bags provided at the checkpoint.
When you return to the U.S., try using mobile passport control , a free app that lets you speed up entry into the country. Travel advisers also recommend taking photos of your passport in case it gets lost.
Keep the heat in mind
Europe is facing another scorching summer. Check whether your lodging has air conditioning—it isn’t a standard offering in many regions, says Arnold, the travel adviser.
Travellers should also bring water bottles and plan breaks indoors during the hottest parts of the day, she says.
Check your health insurance policy
Medicare and Medicaid don’t cover international medical bills. Some private insurances won’t cover all expenses, either.
Before you depart, check your policy and consider buying travel health insurance to avoid pricey charges in a medical emergency.
Bring the right credit card
Travel with a credit card that doesn’t charge foreign transaction fees. Many cards can add charges of 3% or 4% per transaction.
Not every vendor accepts American Express , though it is becoming more available in Europe.
Consider the Olympics
It isn’t too late to attend the Paris Olympics, though it’s not necessarily a cheap ticket. About 30% of hotel rooms in Paris are still available, according to Hotels.com, with the average rate of $455 a night during the Olympics. In Paris, available nightly rates for short-term rentals are averaging $481 a night during that stretch, according to AirDNA, a market-research firm.
Each Thursday, new Olympics event tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. local time—yes, that’s 4 a.m. Eastern—as part of a promotion called Ticketing Thursday. There are also official resale tickets available .
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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
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OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
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From farm-to-table Thai to fairy-lit mango trees and Coral Sea vistas, Port Douglas has award-winning dining and plenty of tropical charm on the side.
