Ten ways to max out your mini-break

Venice and the Alps? Paris and the Champagne vineyards? Lisbon and the seaside? Combine a city break with an escape to country or coast and feel the benefit, says Chris Leadbeater

Just how little of what you fancy is required to do you good? And while we’re on the subject, just how much of a good thing constitutes too much? These are questions your grandmother might well have asked, but they are also conundrums that apply to holidays in the 21st century. Covid, we have been told repeatedly in the past two years, will alter the way we travel. In a world recovering from the pandemic, we will, so the story goes, be looking for richer experiences – escapes that take their time and deliver in detail. Farewell to fly-and-flop; so long to the cheap and easy mini-break. In 2022 and beyond, a getaway needs to do more than before.

At least, that’s the theory. Booking trends for the summer show that a week at the beach is as popular as ever, while reports of the death of the long weekend may have been premature. Data issued by the European Travel Commission in February predicts that tourist arrivals across the continent this year will be just 20 per cent below pre-pandemic levels.

But what constitutes a “mini-break”? And, at a time when travel is still proving to be mildly trickier than it was just three years ago (a PCR test here, a vaccination certificate there, depending on your destination) might it not be better to extend the “long weekend” beyond the three nights that were the norm in 2019? To stretch it – for the same amount of airport faff and form-filling – into something broader and more fulfilling? To four nights? Perhaps even five?

Square route: why not extend that ‘long weekend’ in Venice to five nights?

Here we offer 10 options for escapes that are more than a long weekend, but less than a week. A longer long weekend, if you will. Each involves a city, as mini-breaks tend to, but adds an extra element in each case: a beach; a mountain range; a vineyard; a ski resort; another city. Of course, this probably doesn’t solve the what-youfancy/good-thing equations to any point of mathematical certainty, but if you have a glass of wine in hand and five nights over which to ponder the algebra, you may find that you don’t care.