Every year, the same handful of countries absorb the vast majority of international tourists. Nepal’s Everest Base Camp trek gets more congested. Patagonia’s Torres del Paine adds more boot traffic. Southeast Asia’s greatest hidden gems become a little less hidden and a lot more predictable.
The travel industry recently started calling lesser-known alternatives “destination dupes,” and we think it’s one of the smarter trends to come out of mainstream travel in years.
The idea is simple: instead of fighting the crowds at the world’s most overtouristed hotspots, you travel somewhere that offers a similar (or better) experience without the congestion, the inflated prices, or the feeling that you’re just another number on the ever-moving mass-tourism conveyor belt.
We’ve been running expeditions to countries most people haven’t even heard of since 2017. Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea. If you’ve ever looked at a “top destinations” list and thought, ‘is that really it?’, keep reading.
What is a Destination Dupe?
A destination dupe is a lesser-known travel destination that offers a comparable experience to a more famous (and usually more crowded) one.
Think Ljubljana instead of Paris, or Albania’s Riviera instead of the Greek Islands.
The benefits: same appeal, fewer people, lower prices.
After some digging, we found the term comes from the fashion and beauty world, where a “dupe” is a budget-friendly product that performs as well as the expensive original. Travel writers and social media picked it up around 2024, and it stuck.
Expedia, Booking.com, and just about every major travel publication have since published their own destination dupe lists, and surveys show that a majority of travellers now actively seek them out. The trend is growing because the problem it solves isn’t going away: overtourism is pushing prices up, and the experience of actually being somewhere, properly, keeps getting harder to find at the popular spots.
Where Destination Dupes Get Interesting
Most destination dupe lists, though, stay in a pretty safe lane. They swap one European city break for another, or trade a famous beach for a cheaper one.
That’s fine if your idea of travel is a long weekend with better restaurants or a cocktail on a slightly less crowded beach. But if you’re the kind of person who travels to feel something, to push yourself and come home renewed, the real destination dupes are the ones that barely make those lists at all.
Think remote mountain ranges instead of overcrowded national parks. Nomadic cultures instead of museum tours. Expedition-style treks for authentic active travel instead of guided walks with a gift shop at the end.
That’s the territory we operate in, and it’s where the destination dupe concept gets interesting.
Examples of Destination Dupes
These aren’t the travel dupes you’ll find on clickbait listicles. These are ones actually worth considering, and ones we can vouch for firsthand as a company that’s been running expeditions to some of the world’s most remote destinations for nearly a decade.
Pakistan: More Raw than India & Nepal
Nepal gets roughly a million travelers a year. The trail to Everest Base Camp has teahouses, Wi-Fi hotspots, and, at peak season, queues to view famous viewpoints like Kala Patthar. India’s Himalayan regions, from Ladakh to Rishikesh, have followed a similar path toward accessible and increasingly packaged mountain tourism.
Pakistan’s Karakoram is a whole other world. The K2 Base Camp Trek is a fully self-supported camping expedition through some of the most dramatic glacial terrain on the planet. The reward is a panorama from Concordia that has no equivalent anywhere: K2, Broad Peak, the Gasherbrums, and a corridor of 8,000-meter peaks visible in a single sweep.
But Pakistan isn’t just the Karakoram. The Hunza Valley offers a completely different experience with ancient forts, apricot orchards, and some of the most welcoming communities you’ll encounter anywhere in the world.
The cultural diversity across Pakistan’s northern regions is mind-boggling. Balti, Wakhi, Burushaski, Shina. Each valley has its own language, its own traditions, and its own food. The hospitality is authentic and unrehearsed, and you’ll be certain to feel more like a guest than a tourist.
It’s also becoming significantly more affordable than Nepal for a comparable (and often, superior) mountain experience. Is it safe? Far safer than most people assume.
Kyrgyzstan: Patagonia 50 Years Ago
Patagonia is world-class; it’s also getting loved to death. Torres del Paine has implemented strict visitor caps, and the trails around El Chaltén now come with crowds that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
Kyrgyzstan’s Ak-Suu and Karavshin valleys are what Patagonia might have felt like before the rest of the world found out. Here we find sheer granite walls, alpine meadows, turquoise lakes, and almost no one else. Locals call this area “Asian Patagonia,” and the comparison in our opinion is solid, though in many ways it undersells the place.
When we first scouted this route, we hiked for days without seeing another foreign trekker!
The Ak-Suu and Karavshin Valley Adventure crosses six mountain passes in a single week and includes stays at shepherds’ camps where the hospitality will make you forget the altitude. The whole region is a playground for trekkers who want to earn their views, and the infrastructure hasn’t caught up with the scenery yet. That’s part of why we believe it’s so good.
If you’ve been curious about Central Asia and wondering whether it lives up to the hype, it surpasses it.
Mongolia: The Great Plains but Greater
The American West has its wide-open spaces. Africa’s savannas have vast horizons and nomadic cultures. But neither comparison really captures Mongolia. This is a place that doesn’t have a direct equivalent, which is what makes it one of the most compelling destination dupes on our list.
Mongolia has a population density of roughly two people per square kilometer. Almost half the country’s three million people live in or near Ulaanbaatar, which means the rest of the country is, by most definitions, empty.
But trust us when we say “empty” does not mean boring! The Mongolian Altai is a landscape of ice-capped peaks, glacial valleys, and rolling steppe that stretches to every horizon. The Gobi Desert holds dinosaur fossils, singing sand dunes, and Bactrian camel herders. And in the far west, Kazakh eagle hunters still train golden eagles to hunt foxes and hares on horseback, a tradition that’s been alive for thousands of years and is celebrated each October at the Golden Eagle Festival.
Where most cultural festivals around the world have become performances for tourists, the Golden Eagle Festival is still run by and for the communities that practice it. Compare that to, say, the running of the bulls in Pamplona or Thailand’s full moon parties, and you can certainly feel the difference.
Madeira: Hawaii, but Unspoiled
Volcanic mountains, subtropical forests, dramatic coastlines, and warm weather year-round – there’s a reason why Hawaii is a tropical vacation icon. The problem is that decades of resort development have taken a lot of the raw factor out of the islands.
Maui’s famous road to Hana is bumper-to-bumper in peak season. Accommodation prices are brutal. And a lot of the “adventure” has been packaged into prebooked helicopter tours and guided snorkel excursions that, for some reason, just feel transactional.
Madeira, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic, that many have coined the Hawaii of Europe, delivers the same volcanic terrain, lush greenery, ocean cliffs, and warm weather twelve months a year.
But in this particular dupe vacation – actually being there feels nothing like Hawaii. Or rather, it feels like what Hawaii might have felt like a few decades ago. Forget paved resort walks. Here, you navigate Madeira’s unique levadas: hundreds of kilometers of old irrigation channels hacked directly into the mountainsides. You’ll trace massive cliff edges, push through thick cloud forests, and hike past waterfalls on trails that feel far from standard European trekking.
For the foodies – you’ll eat better here for twenty euros than you will in Hawaii for fifty. Think fresh-caught seafood, espetada grilled on laurel skewers, delicious flatbreads, and the iconic poncha drink made from Madeiran sugarcane rum.
Most importantly, Madeira hasn’t been flattened by its own tourism industry. There are no mega-resorts lining the coast. No chain hotels dominating the waterfront. It still feels like a place where people live, and we hope it stays like that.
Bolivia: Peru without the Crowds
Machu Picchu in Peru is the default choice for an iconic South American trekking experience. Yes, it deserves to be. But due to the boom in popularity, the Inca Trail now requires permits booked months in advance, and Cusco’s old town has, sad to say, lost its charm somewhat. Even the “alternative” routes like Salkantay and Lares are getting crowded these days.
Bolivia’s Cordillera Real offers some of South America’s very best high-altitude Andean trekking experiences. You get the same snow-capped peaks and turquoise alpine lakes, but without the crowds or the machinery built around moving people through.
The trails in Bolivia are quieter, the mountains are just as big, and the indigenous communities along the way haven’t been reshaped by decades of mass tourism.
Bolivia is also significantly cheaper than Peru for almost everything: food, transport, accommodation, and guided trips.
Papua New Guinea: Untamed SE Asia
Thailand, Vietnam, and Bali are among the most popular travel destinations for almost every style of vacation. The food is incredible, the local cultures are rich, the landscapes are stunning, and the backpacker infrastructure makes it all very easy to access.
But with ease comes crowds. What’s left of Bali’s rice terraces are now, sadly, Instagram queues, and Thailand’s islands revolve around party calendars. Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay is filled with tour boats from horizon to horizon, and everything kind of just feels overdone.
Papua New Guinea, in our opinion, is among the strongest destination dupes in Asia. The Kokoda Track is a 96-kilometre jungle trek through some of the most punishing terrain in the Pacific: vertical climbs, river crossings, and a tangle of roots and mud under heavy tropical canopy. It’s also one of the most historically significant walks on Earth, tracing the route of the brutal WWII campaign that shaped Australia and New Zealand’s wartime identity.
Beyond the Kokoda Track, PNG is staggeringly diverse and safer than you think if you travel with a local operator. Over 800 languages are spoken across the country. The highland cultures, the coastal communities, the traditions and ceremonies vary so wildly between regions that calling it one country almost feels like an understatement.
Georgia: Imagine the Alps without Lifts
The European Alps are probably the most famous mountain range on Earth and also the most accessible. Ski lifts, cable cars, mountain restaurants with table service at 3,000 metres, paved walking paths with handrails – it’s all great. But, the Alps have been engineered for maximum accessibility, which is great if you want a mountain view with your lunch. Less great if you want to feel like you’re actually in the mountains.
Georgia’s Svaneti region is what happens when Alpine-scale scenery meets almost zero tourist infrastructure. Medieval stone towers rise from valleys that haven’t changed much in centuries. You trek from village to village, sleep in guesthouses run by families who have been there for generations, and eat food that came from the same hillside you hiked across that morning. The wine is made in qvevri, clay vessels buried underground, a method so old that UNESCO gave it heritage status.
Svaneti doesn’t have cable cars or mountain restaurants. But it’s got all the elements we seek when determining a destination dupe to Europe and its Alps: big mountains, honest trails, and communities that haven’t been hollowed out by tourism. A week of visiting Georgia costs a fraction of what you’d spend in Switzerland, and the experience isn’t a lesser version. It’s just a less polished one. For a lot of people, that’s exactly the point.
Destination Dupes Offer Real Adventure
Let’s be clear here, choosing a destination dupe isn’t a budget hack. Some travel trends are just fleeting fads, and frankly, we didn’t even know the phrase “destination dupes” a few years ago.
But we have known the value of choosing epic, off-the-beaten-path destinations over overtrodden cliches for nearly a decade.
We’re all for this trend! Yes, the logistics are harder. Your legs might burn on steep vertical gains, and your phone may not have a signal to refresh your feed. But that shared hardship is exactly what detoxifies our brains from social media algorithms and builds lifelong bonds.
If you are sick of fighting crowds for a heavily filtered photo and are on the fence on whether to ‘go for it’ or not, we think you know what you need to do. Check out our trip calendar today and join us on an Epic Expedition!
