Abstract In this work, we present a method, called Two-Phase Pareto Local Search, to find a good approximation of the efficient set of the biobjective traveling salesman problem. In the first phase of the method, an initial population composed of a good approximation of the extreme supported efficient solutions is generated. We use as second phase a Pareto Local Search method applied to each solution of the initial population. We show that using the combination of these two techniques: good initial population generation plus Pareto Local Search gives better results than state-of-the-art algorithms. Two other points are introduced: the notion of ideal set and a simple way to produce near-efficient solutions of multiobjective problems, by using an efficient single-objective solver with a data perturbation technique.