Recommendations to visit somewhere less famous are usually framed as a way to escape crowds. The stronger argument is structural: the capacity to absorb visitors already exists there.
Infrastructure is built for residents, not peaks
A working city sizes its transport, water and waste systems for its own population and its commuting flows, which are large relative to visitor numbers.
Adding tourists to that base is a marginal load rather than a doubling, so the systems continue operating within their design range.
In heavily visited small centres the reverse holds, with visitors outnumbering residents in the affected districts and every system running past its intended capacity.
Accommodation competes with a real housing market
Where a city has employment and a resident population, long-term tenancies remain competitive against short-term letting, which slows the conversion of housing to visitor use.
Hotels in such cities also serve business travel, which fills weekdays and off-season and reduces the pressure to build capacity purely for the summer peak.
The consequence is that leisure visitors slot into existing supply rather than driving the construction of dedicated capacity that sits empty most of the year.
Spending reaches ordinary businesses
In a saturated centre, the retail and hospitality within reach of the main sights has already converted to visitor-facing trade with volume-driven pricing.
A less visited city retains its ordinary economy, so visitor spending flows to businesses that also serve residents and are more likely to be locally owned.
That widens the distribution of the income and reduces the leakage that occurs when a district's commerce is dominated by intermediaries and chains.
Residents encounter tourism differently
Where visitors are a modest share of the street population, tourism is experienced as trade rather than as displacement, and local support for it stays intact.
That support matters, because it determines whether a city invests in visitor infrastructure or in restricting access.
Once residents perceive that a district has been taken from them, the political response tends toward limits, and the limits arrive after the damage.
The constraint is awareness, not attraction
Second cities usually hold substantial heritage, food culture and museum collections, and often better transport connections than the famous small towns nearby.
What they lack is the single photographable image that drives recommendation systems, which is a marketing gap rather than a shortage of things to do.
Using them as a base and travelling out to the famous site for a day inverts the usual pattern, and shifts the accommodation load to where it can be absorbed.