For people who travel a lot, there is always the question of: where is the next underrated spot to visit?

Notwithstanding people have different interests and preferences for travel, due to the spread of travel blogs, Reddit and simply how much people love talking about travel (especially, while already travelling), I generally think most travel destinations are pretty accurately calibrated for what they offer 

One interesting aspect when understanding a region’s travel desirability is the heuristic of what counts as “visiting a country.” My belief is there are many small countries that are visited more than they arguably deserve based on what they offer, merely because they exist as an independent country. Note: I don’t think this is exclusively just people being vain and wanting to increase their country count, but more so that “country” is the natural category in which people think about places.

The converse of this is that there are many regions, especially those in very large countries—and even more so when they represent a different culture than what that country is known for—which, if they were independent countries, would merit significantly more travel attention.

I will note that some of this is because countries have safety or bureaucratic issues, whereas a small, disconnected remote region with different cultures than the majority might not be caught up in the same mess. At the same time, there are many places people visit already where the actual travel destination is far away and completely distinct from what that country is known for. Sorry Santiago and the rest of Chile, but people visit Patagonia for Patagonia as the main draw, not anything else to do with Chile. Similarly, people visit Zanzibar, even though it is small, isolated and wholly distinct from Tanzania — this is even more extreme in Indonesia with Bali.

To that end, here are places that I think would be far more visited if they existed as independent countries:

Sichuan, Yunnan, Tibet, Sikkim/Ladakh, Gilgit-Baltistan, Kerala, Kurdistan, Scotland, Bavaria, Corsica, Sardinia, Quebec, Alaska/Canadian north, Utah, Oaxaca.

And countries that I think, if they weren’t independent nations, would fare considerably worse with tourism.

Bhutan, Ireland, Singapore, pretty much all small countries in the Baltics or Balkans (eg Montenegro, Estonia), Namibia, Malta

Note: this isn’t some data-based analysis, just me thinking what makes sense in my head.