Trip ideas 2026: city breaks and road trips to take

Two shapes of trip dominate 2026 planning: the short city break of three to five days, and the self-drive route where the road is the point. This page is the way into both. Below you will find four category pages, each leading to full guides, and each one you can hand to our planner to turn into a day-by-day itinerary.

Where to start

Best city trips 2026 covers short breaks worldwide, from Tokyo and Cape Town to Buenos Aires, grouped by how long they actually take.

Best Europe city breaks 2026 narrows that to the long-weekend range, where short flights and dense historic centres make two to four days genuinely enough.

Best Europe road trips 2026 gathers the loops and coastal drives: Iceland's Ring Road, Scotland's North Coast 500, Germany's Romantic Road, the Norwegian fjords and the Amalfi Coast.

Best worldwide road trips 2026 goes further afield, to Australia's Great Ocean Road, the Canadian Rockies and Chile's Carretera Austral.

Why these two shapes

City breaks have grown because they fit around work and school rather than requiring a fortnight. Three days is enough for a compact European capital, and five for a large hub like Tokyo or London. The pattern that keeps recurring is an anchor city with nature attached: Lisbon with Sintra, Reykjavik with the Golden Circle, Cape Town with the Winelands.

Road trips answer the opposite impulse. They suit travellers who would rather move slowly through a region than tick off one city, and they open up places no train reaches. The trade-off is planning: a route only works if the daily driving is honest about distance and daylight.

How the planner fits in

Reading a guide gives you the shape of a trip. Turning it into dates, stays and a sequence that works is the tedious part, and that is what the planner is for. You give it the destination, your dates, budget and pace, and it drafts a day-by-day itinerary you can then adjust.

Treat the first draft as a starting point rather than a finished plan. Check the travel times against the guides here, move anything that looks too ambitious for one day, and re-run it when you change your mind about length or pace.

Choosing between them

If you have a long weekend and want food, museums and walking, take a city break. If you have a week or more, want scenery over sights, and are comfortable driving in an unfamiliar country, take a road trip.

The middle ground is worth knowing about: several routes here start and end in a city worth two days on its own. Reykjavik before the Ring Road, Inverness before the North Coast 500, and Melbourne before the Great Ocean Road all work that way, which is a reasonable answer if your group disagrees about which kind of trip to take.

Practical notes for 2026

Book headline attractions ahead. Timed entry is now the norm at the busiest museums and monuments, and turning up on the day increasingly means not getting in.

Shoulder season keeps proving itself. April to June and September to October give you better weather than winter and thinner crowds than August, across both Europe's cities and most of its driving routes.

For road trips, check what the car actually needs to handle. Paved routes like the Romantic Road and the Amalfi Coast are fine in a standard car; Iceland's side roads, parts of the Highlands and Patagonia are a different question.