Prioritize Cities Instead of Counties or Countries in Site Architecture

[Townpages]

I am designing the structure of a large travel webiste and have the following problem.

The obvious structure from a users perspective would be to structure locations as follows:

Home/Hotels/Country/County/City

i.e. Home/Hotels/UK/Lancashire/Preston

The problem is, it is the cities that I need closer to the root directory, instead of countries and counties.

If I did Home/Hotels/City or even

Home/Hotels/Country/City

There may be too many links on one page and google may think they're spammy.

How can I get the cities closer to the root directory as they are the most important pages on the site. Even if I did a text based sitemap I would encounter the same problem.

*scratches head!

Thanks in Advance,

Nick

UPDATE_________________________________________________________

Sorry I may have phrased the question wrongly.

I should have said that I need the city pages to be less clicks from the root directory, as opposed to their actual URL structure.

Ideally, I want to be able to access the city pages before the county and country pages on the site, as they are more important.

Thanks A Bunch

[strilliams]

Hi Steve, a lot of consideration needs to be placed on the scale of the website. How many countries around the world, how many continents etc etc.

In terms of coming up with an intuitive and relatively simple way to reduce the number of clicks to an actual city, I'd recommend a large, full-width map with big dots for more popular cities and that sort of thing. Could like be created using HTML5/CSS3 for maximum SEO friendliness. The advantage of a map is it's immediately intuitive and doesn't require drop-down menus or anything of that variety.

So the structure I'm suggesting would theoretically allow one-click to top cities which is going to make a lot of people very happy

[Townpages]

Thanks so much for such a swift reply,

Sorry I may have phrased the question wrongly.

I should have said that I need the city pages to be less clicks from the root directory, as opposed to their actual URL structure.

Ideally, I want to be able to access the city pages before the county and country pages on the site, as they are more important.

Thanks A Bunch