Here is a quiet fact the tourism brochures never mention: some of the most serious newsrooms on earth — the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, National Geographic, Forbes, Fortune — have been telling their readers to pay attention to Montenegro for roughly two decades. Not the travel-influencer circuit. The papers that move markets and shape itineraries for people who can go anywhere. They kept circling the same small country on the Adriatic, each from a different angle, each a few years apart. Read them in sequence and they stop looking like scattered features and start looking like a countdown. In 2026, the clock has nearly run out — so here is what the world's press has actually been saying, and why this is the year it all comes true.
2018, The Wall Street Journal: “lifting all boats, including tiny Montenegro”
The WSJ headline was almost affectionate: “Europe's tourism boom is lifting all boats, including tiny Montenegro.” The numbers underneath it were not tiny at all. A country of roughly 650,000 people had drawn about a million tourists in a year, tourism was generating around €1 billion — close to a third of GDP, and only Croatia was growing faster in all of Europe. The Journal opened not with a statistic but with a boatman in the Bay of Kotor watching Western visitors arrive in numbers his village had never seen. That image — a local ferrying the world into Boka Bay — turned out to be the whole story in miniature.
2019, The New York Times: go to Kotor instead of Dubrovnik
A year later, The New York Times placed Montenegro on a very particular list: “6 Places in Europe Offering Shelter From the Crowds.” The pitch was elegantly simple. Dubrovnik and Kotor are both walled Adriatic cities once ruled by Venice, both ringed by mountains, both stacked with terra-cotta roofs and medieval churches. But Dubrovnik was drowning in cruise-ship crowds while Kotor — which received a fraction of the visitors — was “still fighting for attention.” The Times was, in effect, handing readers a loophole: the same Adriatic magic, minus the queues. Seven years on, that loophole is still open, though narrowing.
2024, National Geographic: the bay, reintroduced
National Geographic Traveller returned to the same water in 2024 with a weekend guide to the Bay of Kotor, noting that Montenegro had “quietly cultivated a reputation as one of southeastern Europe's most eclectic travel destinations.” The tell was in the details it chose: the new Kotor cable car, opened in 2023, now lifts visitors 1,300 metres to Lovćen; baroque Perast reframed as a serene alternative to the busier old town. This was no longer a scrappy secret being leaked. It was a mature destination being catalogued — the difference between “you should go” and “here is how to do it well.”
Forbes and the FT: the Monaco that got built
Run alongside the travel coverage a second, wealthier storyline. When Canadian mining magnate Peter Munk turned a derelict Yugoslav naval base in Tivat into Porto Montenegro — which Forbes called “the ultimate superyacht sanctuary” — the ambition was explicit: build the next Monaco on the Adriatic. The Financial Times has tracked this transformation across years of coverage (from Montenegro's independence era to its property boom), the through-line being that serious capital decided this coastline was undervalued long before most tourists did. The marina now berths yachts up to 250 metres. The Monaco comparison, once a pitch, became a price tag.
2025, Fortune: the world's fastest-growing millionaire hub
Then came the line that should make any traveller sit up. In 2025, Fortune reported how Montenegro became the world's fastest-growing hub for millionaires. Drawing on the Henley Private Wealth Migration Report, the story noted Montenegro's high-net-worth population had jumped roughly 124% over a decade — a growth rate outpacing Monaco, Singapore and Switzerland. The absolute numbers are still small (a few thousand millionaires), but the direction is the point. The people whose full-time job is to spot undervalued places early have been quietly relocating to the exact coastline the travel desks kept recommending.
The twist: the countdown ends in 2028
String those stories together and a pattern emerges that no single article states outright. For twenty years, the world's most credible publications have described Montenegro as almost — almost the next Croatia, almost the next Monaco, almost mainstream, almost too good to stay this cheap. What none of them could name was the catalyst that would finally close the gap. Now there is one. Montenegro is on track to join the European Union at the start of 2028, and a senior EU official recently priced the cost of admitting it at about €1 per European per year — “a very cheap cup of coffee.”
That is the update the archive has been waiting for. The WSJ's tourism boom, the Times' crowd-free loophole, National Geographic's mature destination, the FT's undervalued coast, Fortune's millionaire migration — accession is the event that resolves all of them at once. We wrote separately about the “cheap coffee” invitation and, for buyers, why this is Europe's last undervalued coast. Both rest on the same insight the world's press circled for two decades.
The pitch: read the room, then book the room
Here is the honest version. When one travel blog calls a place “the next big thing,” ignore it. When the FT, the WSJ, the NYT, National Geographic, Forbes and Fortune all describe the same 300 kilometres of coast — independently, across twenty years, from the tourism desk to the wealth desk — that is not hype. That is a consensus that simply hadn't reached its moment yet.
The moment is now. You can still walk the Venetian walls of Kotor without a cruise-ship scrum, still afford a Tivat terrace the millionaires are quietly buying up, still drink that famous one-euro coffee on a stone quay above the bay. The papers told you. The only thing left is to go — before the last “almost” falls away. Plan your Montenegro trip, or see what's on the coast the smart money already noticed.
Sources
- The Wall Street Journal, “Europe's tourism boom is lifting all boats, including tiny Montenegro” (2018) — wsj.com
- The New York Times, “6 Places in Europe Offering Shelter From the Crowds” (2019) — nytimes.com
- National Geographic Traveller, “How to spend a weekend in Montenegro's Bay of Kotor” (2024) — nationalgeographic.com
- Forbes, “Porto Montenegro Is Becoming The Ultimate Superyacht Sanctuary” (2018) — forbes.com
- Fortune, “How Montenegro became the world's fastest-growing hub for millionaires” (2025) — fortune.com
- Financial Times, Montenegro coverage — ft.com
- European Western Balkans, “How much would Montenegro's accession cost the European Union?” (3 July 2026) — europeanwesternbalkans.com
