When you type a destination into a booking site, you're not searching for a place. You're searching for a category. The site knows this. The tourism board knows this. The travel journalist who spent four nights in a sponsored hotel knows this too. The words they use – city break, beach holiday, adventure destination, cultural trip, off the beaten track – are labels, the same way "high in protein" or "a good source of fibre" are labels. And like nutritional information, they are technically accurate in ways that are practically misleading. Here's what's actually in each tin.

City Break (Contains: a weekend's worth of queues, served chilled)

A city break is a place with an airport within forty-five minutes of something photogenic. That's the whole definition. The label promises urban energy, probably some restaurants someone has written about in a supplement, and the specific exhausted satisfaction of walking fourteen thousand steps and calling it culture – but it does not promise, and almost never delivers, the city as its residents actually experience it. The real neighbourhood. The café where nobody is filming their coffee. What you get instead is the tourism district, which is its own separate village that happens to be geographically inside the real one.

Beach Holiday (Contains: sunshine sold in advance, results may vary)

The beach holiday category is unique in that it is the only one where the product is essentially weather, and weather is not included. What is included is guaranteed proximity to sand, a resort infrastructure of some kind, and the ambient understanding that you are allowed to do nothing for a week without explaining yourself to anyone. That last part is the honest appeal of a beach holiday, and almost nobody says it. The label sells sun. The purchase is permission to be idle in public.

Adventure Destination (Batteries Not Included)

"Adventure destination" is a label that requires effort from the consumer rather than the product. The destination supplies the terrain – a volcano, a gorge, a suspiciously rickety bridge – and you supply the bit that makes it adventure, which is doing something in it. This matters because the category is essentially meaningless without knowing what the visitor is willing to do. Iceland is an adventure destination. So is Snowdonia. So is a forest forty minutes from Wolverhampton if you go into it.

Cultural Trip (May Contain Traces of Art)

A cultural trip is a beach holiday where you feel slightly better about yourself on the flight home. The label implies engagement with a place's history, art, or way of life, but in practice it usually means a museum on day two and excellent pasta. The genuinely interesting thing about the cultural trip category is what it quietly excludes: food markets, religious ceremonies, local festivals, anything that doesn't sit behind a ticket barrier or get mentioned on a blue plaque.

Off the Beaten Track (Now Heavily Signposted)

This is the label that collapses on inspection most dramatically. By the time a destination appears as "off the beaten track" on a major booking platform, it has, definitionally, been beaten into a track. The label originally described a navigational reality – paths not yet worn by tourism – but now it describes an aesthetic: somewhere that looks like fewer people have been, even if last August it had a two-hour queue and a gift shop. For UK and European travel booking, somewhere like https://www.iglu.com covers destinations across every category, which is as good a place as any to test these labels against the reality.

The track, it turns out, was beaten by the person who invented the category.