Avoiding Crowds

To the extent I can I try to avoid holidays and when the kids are out of school

We always have traveled off-season, generally to France, but inevitably there are holidays and school vacation weeks. However, we now mostly spend our time in rural France, so crowds are rarely a problem even then.

We were in London in June, arriving on a Sunday and leaving on a Saturday. I really didn’t think the crowds were bad outside of a few heavily touristed areas (around Westminster abbey and subway station were the only really crowded areas). Frankly I had expected much worse.

Wouldn't it be a wonderful world if all the tourists stayed home so I could enjoy these sites by myself? Reminds me of the lament often heard in the faculty lounge -- generally towards the end of spring semester -- "The university would be so great if we didn't have to put up with all of these students." You chose your time and live and die with the crowds. We try to travel in the Fall. Works pretty well except that we do run into the Heritage/Culture Days. It is interesting because there are places that are only open during the Culture days, mostly free, but super crowded with the locals.

People are dying every year now trying to climb Mt. Everest.... Almost no one dies trying to climb K2, which its # 2.... The best way to avoid really big crowds if you must travel during high season is to mix in a selection of great sites that are not #1 in every guidebook. Dinkelsbuhl or Nordlingen instead of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, the Marksburg rather than Burg Eltz, Lake Garda in Italy instead of Lake Como, Etc. Guidebooks actually mention many of these places, but naturally focus most of the attention on the top twenty places/sites in each country. There are fun castles, great art, wonderful food everywhere in Europe (and the US). Smaller places get you closer to the wineries too.

Tested the tool. Not recommended for Germany.

Example Oct. 1st: the info that there are no school vacations in Germany is wrong. Two large states will have school vacations on this date. Furthermore it is two days ahead of national holiday. Therefore a lot of people will spend 4 days on their work holidays to achieve 9 days without working. And a lot of them will be in Berlin.

A score of 100 for Edinburgh tomorrow. Looking forward to it!

You should have seen Oxford last Sunday - and the British Museum was like the Boxing Day sales.....

I agree with emma about the City of London. It is pretty quiet on weekends, but it also means that a lot of shops and other such places close as well because they mainly exist to serve City workers. I also just tried it for December 21, 2019, i.e. the last shopping weekend before Christmas, and it gives London a score of just 5. I say that this is garbage. In a city like London with a large local population, it is the locals who make up a large proportion of the crowds in shopping areas such as Oxford Street as well as on the Tube. I remember when I lived in London, the biggest crowds I experienced on the Tube were on the weekends leading up to Christmas.

It is off on specific days but it also shows some interesting trends if you look at the charts, which are not far from what I've seen.

The website isn't trying to "prove anything." It's more about congestion trends during the year.

London is dead on weekends? I guess a lot of people didn't get the memo when I was there. Maybe I'll send out a mass e-mail reminder, my friends.

I was talking about the City of London, which is what is now the financial district of London. That does not include Westminster or the Southbank or many other areas.. The crowds in London are not evenly distributed.

To be more specific, the City of London is shown on this map.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&ei=6oxYXfKkFIjjz7sP1JCH2Ag&q=city+of+london+map&oq=city+of+london+map&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l10.1364.2524..2835...0.2..0.194.672.0j4......0....1..gws-wiz.......0i71j0i67.mGO6wrRL_oE&ved=0ahUKEwjywcrhhovkAhWI8XMBHVTIAYsQ4dUDCAo&uact=5

@BigMike, if you put "avoid crowd" in the search box you will get almost 2400 entries just on this forum -- sorry to tell you that you're not exactly the first.

From Avoid-Crowds.com

Thank you very much for posting a link to our website and the feedback in the replies.

After reading the feedback, we would like to explain some things. Our model is still in Beta with lots of improvements coming for when we release crowd scores for 2020 in the coming months.

For 2020 we will have more and better data on most destinations including German cities and London. We already changed our model for the German cities to better reflect the school vacations in Hessen and Rheinland-Pfalz. This will come live on the website in a few hours. The German issue was already identified but the change was planned for later. Thanks to this thread we pushed the implementation.

For London, it is correct we only focus on tourist areas. This was a deliberate choice and a simplification as was pointed out in some of the feedback. We actually like this simplification and also don’t have enough data to support crowd scores for different neighborhoods. The same simplification is in place at all destinations. It is not our aim to predict crowds for each area in a city or each individual tourist hotspot (for now). We changed the London introduction to reflect this. Christmas shopping was a miss and has now been corrected.

Please keep the valuable feedback coming as it helps us improve the website!

Just looked at that webpage for today in Edinburgh and it is set at 100, but we have the tattoo and the biggest art festival in the world going on at the moment, I tend to avoid the main city center at this time of year but the knock on effect to the public transport system still causes major problems at this time of year.
Tomorrow morning I am heading off to Prague for 11 nights, that has a score of 97. fortunately I will not be doing the tourist sites and will unlikely be in the main tourist areas much.
I can understand locals rebelling against mass tourism and certainly if I lived or worked in Edinburgh city centre at this time of year I would feel pretty annoyed.if locals were to benefit from the tourism with lower council charges, cheaper transport and better public facilities,they might think that the pay off to be worth it.

Most likely the most crowded cities I have been in during peak season in the summer are Paris and London. Vienna and certainly Berlin do not get the tedious crowds as Paris. True, dealing with them is taxing and tedious, especially taking the ICE trains in Germany.

On a couple of lines from A to B, not one time would I say it was satisfactory, if not downright unpleasant due to the crowds on that line in the summer.

Evidence of crowds is on the Paris Metro when you are packed in like sardines. No U-Bahn line in Vienna or Berlin has even come close to being packed into the degree as I've experienced in Paris. Likewise with the Tube. The Paris Metro is the most acute.

What to do? You work around it. In both Paris and lesser in London, I use the buses to augment getting around. I still go in the summer to Paris. No trip to Paris gets old, and I go the other listed cities too.

No U-Bahn line in Vienna or Berlin has even come close to being packed
into the degree as I've experienced in Paris.

:-) We have also a lot of events when it gets over-cozy in U-Bahn and S-Bahn; some of them coming up such as Berlin Marathon and also regularly soccer games of Hertha. Union stadium is much smaller, so not such a big issue. Just to manage the expectations for visitors of Berlin.

At very rare occasions Bono from U2 may open the door of a U2 train and sings live ;-)

We avoid traveling in the summer to not be mobbed by tourist crowds.

As for the local crowds of a major city, you either wait until rush-hour crowds start to dwindle or join them.

I generally travel at least shoulder season, September is by far my favorite month to travel. After Ireland in May, which shouldn't have been high season but was fairly packed with tourists, my feeling is the best thing to do is drive during cooler months and visit towns that aren't on any travel writer's radar. The towns may be so-so or hidden gems, but you will avoid crowds and experience the local culture.

Brad, that's interesting as we self-drove parts of Ireland over a week around Memorial Day in late May, 2016. It was not crowded at all, and even the Cliffs of Moher's parking lot was maybe 25 percent full. The lack of crowds at the time is mystifying to me, even though it wasn't a bank holiday. I've read the Moher parking lot can be more than full during peak season, which would be an incredible number of people.

I can understand the stress and annoyance of tourists flocking to a certain location. Unless you're running a business profiting from the masses, it can be rather unpleasant. A minor example of this is Skyline Drive along the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. During the fall parts of the 105 mile drive can be very congested as tourists enjoy the fall foliage, which means it's very dangerous for cyclists, as everyone is looking at the leaves. Anyway, I avoid cycling there when the colors come out. Getting "back to nature" with traffic jams and campsites filled to maximum capacity is not my thing.

This is an interesting question.

Reminds me a bit of those 1970s backpacking tourists who always wanted to go to the places where none of those despised package tourists were, completely oblivious to the fact that they themselves were tourists (worse yet, tourists who weren't even leaving any significant amount of money in the country).

Or of those magazines that advertise "The World's Last Secret Paradises!", and you can be sure that if they ever were secret paradises to begin with, they are not any more now.

For photographers, there is a rule: If you are in a spot where a hundred people are all photographing that same beautiful scenic motif, just turn around 180 degrees. (I got my greatest Santorini shot that way while everyone else was shooting that standard Oia sunset.)

The same thing goes for avoiding crowds: Just turn around 180 degrees and go in the opposite direction from where everyone else is going. On a Greek island, go inland, and you'll have picturesque mountain towns all to yourself. In the mountains or forests, hike ten minutes from the parking lot, and you'll have the forest all to yourself.

(O.k., I'll admit that this won't work if you just want to see those main tourist attractions. :-) )

I'm a teacher so every placed is crowded when I go....4 more years to retirement!

My future son-in-law is running the Berlin Marathon in Sept 2020 (he's never not qualified...he's super fast) and I've already put our union guy on notice to help me figure out how I can get the time off.

Anna, good advice.

Julie, a fellow teacher quietly taunted me with "four more years" as I walked by. I gave her the "I don't know" look. Best to you.