What Do Americans Want in a European Vacation? Fewer Americans
As the hottest spots get overrun with U.S. tourists, some visitors plan vacations to new countries and regions
4 min
For some U.S. travellers, this summer’s hottest European destination is one without other Americans.
American tourists mobbed Europe last year, and 2023 is looking even busier, travel advisers say. Reservations for European trips rose 8% over last summer, according to data from Hopper, a travel app. Delta Air Lines President Glen Hauenstein said last week that 75% of seats on the carrier’s international flights this summer are already booked, even with added flights and seats.
Searches for round-trip flights to perennially popular cities such as Milan and London have increased over the past year, according to data from Skyscanner, a travel-search site. Also rising are searches for relatively obscure destinations such as Split, Croatia (up 73%), and Tirana, Albania (up 57%). The biggest gainer over the past year? Oslo, Norway, with a 307% increase in Skyscanner searches.
Airfares remain expensive, with the most recent consumer-price index for airline tickets up nearly 18% compared with a year earlier. Finding a hotel room in major destinations such as Barcelona or Rome—let alone an affordable one—takes serious work, travel advisers say.
Some travellers are instead looking to less-well-visited regions such as the Balkans and other corners of Eastern Europe. That is partly because of cost and partly because these tourists have already been to Paris and London, travel pros say.
Melissa Biggs Bradley, founder and CEO of New York-based travel company Indagare, says people who visited Europe last summer are leading the push toward these new destinations.
These travellers sought out tried-and-true destinations last year, she says, when they were resuming international travel as pandemic restrictions eased. After being isolated for so long, they weren’t scared off by the size of the crowds. The composition of the crowds was another matter.
“In a lot of the great resorts in Europe, people were just surrounded by other Americans,” Mrs. Bradley says.
Travellers also encountered large-scale problems with luggage at big airports and issues with service at understaffed hotels in major cities.
Erin Thibeau, a 31-year-old marketing manager who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., chose to visit Lisbon for her first European trip last year, since it was familiar.
“I knew I would have a really lovely time, and I could navigate around pretty easily,” she says.
Ms. Thibeau says she is seeking out places where she is “not one of countless Americans.” So she chose the country of Georgia for her next Euro trip, hoping it would offer more interaction with locals. Ms. Thibeau plans to use the capital, Tbilisi, as a base to tour the country, visiting wineries and monasteries.
Travel professionals say many clients are seeking places that closely resemble popular destinations. Albania has grown popular as a spot for Adriatic Sea vacations similar to what one might experience in nearby Croatia, says Laura Lindsay, travel trends and destinations specialist at Skyscanner.
Other substitute destinations: Slovenia for those considering vacations to Italy, and northern mainland Greece or Turkey as a swap for the Greek Isles.
It doesn’t take long for an under-the-radar destination to become a hot spot. Mrs. Bradley sent many people to Sicily last year because it had availability when the Amalfi Coast and Venice didn’t. The popularity of the HBO series “The White Lotus” has made Sicily an in-demand location this summer.
Now, she says she recommends Mediterranean islands such as Corsica and Sardinia, or regions of mainland Italy, such as Puglia.
Venturing to less-traveled parts of Europe comes with trade-offs. Major tourism hubs such as Paris or Rome have more lodging options and expansive transit networks, as well as plenty of English speakers at hotels, restaurants and shops.
For tourists, “the key there is how comfortable they are in a destination where English is going to be a bit more of a challenge for some of the locals,” says Mike Salvadore, owner and co-president of 58 Stars Travel, a luxury travel agency based in Seattle.
Going to a place such as Romania or Malta might not save much money, because direct flights can be rare, and connections take time.
Food and activities often will cost less in these regions, but hotels might not be much of a bargain. Average daily rates for hotels have risen by more than a third compared with last year in Turkey, North Macedonia and Bulgaria, among others, according to preliminary March data from hospitality analytics company STR. Apart from high demand, inflation has driven those prices higher across much of Europe.
Teressa Steinbach, a 44-year-old mother of two from Louisville, Ky., is set to venture with her family to Europe in June for her daughters’ first visit to the continent.
The family had originally planned to visit friends in Italy, an itinerary that would have cost them around $20,000, but the trip didn’t pan out, Mrs. Steinbach says.
Instead, they are taking a 10-day trip to Split, with jaunts planned to other parts of Croatia and neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mrs. Steinbach has tapped Facebook groups dedicated to Croatian travel for advice. Locals and past visitors have suggested a boat ride to the island of Brač, with its white-pebble beaches, and rafting down the Cetina river.
The Croatian vacation is hardly a bargain. Round-trip flights in premium-economy class will cost the family of four around $11,000, while their hotel will add around $6,000, she says.
It has proved a tougher sell for her daughters, ages 7 and 11, whose classmates traveled to France over spring break, Mrs. Steinbach says.
“My oldest said, ‘I’m going to lie and say that we went to Italy,’ ” she says. “She was like, ‘Who goes to Croatia?’ ”
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From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
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