Celebrities Are Quietly Ditching Mykonos for Folegandros

For years, the celebrity travel story was about which famous place a famous person had been photographed at. This year's actual story is the opposite: a growing number of high-profile travellers are deliberately choosing places specifically because nobody will photograph them there at all.

Folegandros over Mykonos

Travel planners working with entertainment clients describe a clear pattern this season: bookings are shifting away from the obvious European hotspots in high season toward islands where clients simply will not be recognised. Folegandros, a small, cliff-town Cycladic island roughly a third of the size of Mykonos with almost none of its nightlife infrastructure, has become the specific example planners keep naming, offering the same whitewashed, sea-cliff aesthetic without a single beach club or paparazzi stakeout.

Whitewashed cliffside village on the Greek island of Folegandros — Folegandros delivers the same Cycladic aesthetic as Mykonos with none of its nightlife infrastructure or crowds

The Caribbean's quieter corners

The same shift is playing out in the Caribbean, where St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines are pulling clients who would previously have defaulted to a more photographed island entirely. St. Lucia's dramatic twin-peak coastline gives a trip the same visual payoff as its flashier neighbours, without the same density of charter boats and drone photographers working the coastline for a paparazzi sale.

Coastline and mountains of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean — St. Lucia is pulling clients who want the Caribbean's visual payoff without the density of a more photographed island

The new status symbol is being unreachable

What is actually driving this is less about geography and more about intent. Entertainment clients are increasingly travelling less often but staying longer and going further off grid each time, with long train journeys and multi-day treks replacing the tightly scheduled, multi-stop luxury circuit that used to define a celebrity summer. Being unreachable for two weeks straight has become the thing worth having, in a way that a recognisable hotel logo used to be.

Where the old favourites still fit

This does not mean Mykonos is finished, Zendaya, Brad Pitt, and Leonardo DiCaprio are all still turning up at plenty of the established circuit stops this year, and Tulum remains a reliable, more affordable middle ground between full visibility and full disappearance. But the direction of travel among planners is unmistakable: the destinations gaining the most bookings this season are the ones built for not being found, not the ones built for being seen.

What this means for booking a similar trip

None of this requires celebrity money to copy. The actual playbook is simple: pick the smaller island next to the famous one rather than the famous one itself. Folegandros sits a short ferry from Santorini, St. Lucia is a similarly short hop from Barbados, and both routes let a traveller borrow the same regional infrastructure, the same flight connections, the same general climate, while landing somewhere with a fraction of the crowd and none of the inflated high-season pricing that fame brings with it.

The trend has a shelf life, and everyone knows it

Travel planners are candid about the risk built into this strategy: the moment a quiet island gets consistently tagged in high-profile posts, it stops being quiet. Folegandros has maybe two or three seasons before it follows the exact same trajectory Mykonos did a decade ago, which is precisely why the smart move for anyone chasing this specific mood is to go now rather than wait for it to get discovered and lose the thing that made it worth going for in the first place.