Credit, Getty Images
-
- author, Laura Hall
- To roll, BBC Travel
-
Reading time: 8 min
Data analysts, human behavior scientists and travel companies have been compiling their data in recent months to assess the next direction of the tourism sector.
One of these trends was called coolcations (vacation to escape the heat). It appeared a few years ago and became one of the Collins English Dictionary’s words of the year. Another is flash packagingterm used to refer to luxury backpackers.
Words like these almost always reflect the way we live or want to live.
We take a look at the year’s best travel predictions, new words coined, and everything in between. And these are the main trends on the horizon for 2026.
1. Above all, calm down
One trend should dominate next year: silencesor a quiet vacation.
This movement is also called silence (hospitality of silence). It’s about offering comfort and silence, as a way to escape the accumulated stress of modern life.
With our always-on digital culture and a never-ending loop of world events happening to us in real time, it’s no surprise that many people want to disconnect.
Hector Hughes is one of the founders of a series of digital detox cabins called Unplugged in the UK. He watched this trend take shape.
“When we launched Unplugged, in 2020, we barely heard about digital detox and analog living,” he says. “Today, more than half of our customers cite burnout and fatigue in front of screens as the main motivations for coming to us.”
Credit, Getty Images
This trend is spreading everywhere.
Visit Skåne’s stillness map shows a network of decibel-rated places in southern Sweden. This allows you to find peace and quiet in this region.
Guests at Skycave Retreats in Oregon, USA, stay for three days in cabins in total darkness.
2. Use AI to plan the roadmap
A study by travel portal Amadeus indicates that more and more tourists are using generative AI to plan trips and make reservations. And, with major portals like Expedia and Booking.com integrating tools like ChatGPT, it’s getting easier to ask bots to plan vacations for us.
Add to that real-time translation and digital check-ins via cellphone and we see technology quietly replacing much of the administrative work that once defined a trip.
Sustainability experts warn that the algorithm’s recommendations could fuel excessive tourism, pushing many people to the same destinations. And these tools are also behind a growing number of travel scams.
Therefore, you should be careful when using these functions.
Credit, Getty Images
For Jasmine Bina, cultural trends expert and CEO of brand consultancy Concept Bureau, generative AI is changing how we want to be expressed, but not why we travel.
“You may want to go to a resort to recover from burnout,” she says.
“But now, instead of just searching for resorts on TikTok, you’ll first use ChatGPT to assess your specific type of burnout, what rituals or sensory experiences help you, and which destination best reflects your internal state.”
3. Let others decide for you what to do
It could be fatigue from making decisions, pure laziness, or excitement from letting someone else make the choices. The fact is that there is a clear increase in travel experiences in which the customer does not need to make a decision.
In the Faroe Islands (a self-governing territory of Denmark), choices are being eliminated in the name of sustainability, with a new initiative offering self-driving cars. And in other parts of the world, the trend is to help create a truly relaxing and renewing vacation.
In Mendoza, Argentina, Susana Balboa’s Winemaker’s House & Spa Suites has launched a mystery travel option designed to take the stress out of booking and create curated surprises for guests.
In the shipping industry, mystery cruises are becoming increasingly popular. In these, passengers board without knowing the route.
A trends report from travel PR firm Lemongrass says these types of third-party getaways reflect increased decision fatigue and the cognitive overload of making constant micro-decisions, both at home and away.
4. Take the road rather than the plane
He points out that the hashtag #RoadTrip has reached more than 5.9 million mentions worldwide, indicating that tourists are rediscovering the charm of land travel.
Credit, Getty Images
Specialist road trip agency HunterMoss reinvents the classic road trip into a luxury experience. It combines dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants and stops for selected experiences.
But many tourists prefer to drive for a very different reason: cost. In the Hilton survey, 60% of Brits said they planned to drive to their destination to save money.
Milena Nikolova is the Behavior Manager at the BehaviorSMART platform, specializing in understanding how and why we travel. She finds the road trip boom has a distinctly American flavor.
“The nature of the relationship between people and cars in North America and Europe is very different,” she explains. “They have a different attitude toward driving for fun.”
5. An ultra personalized trip for you
Booking the same trip for everyone is a thing of the past. The tourism sector is moving towards hyper-individuality on a large scale.
Specialist tours have emerged in recent years to suit specific situations and life stages, from divorce and bereavement to menopause, marriage and special interests, such as holidays to play specific sports and itineraries for insect lovers.
For Bina, this change reflects the way we experience time today.
“Life has become an infinite loop, with fewer rituals and rites of passage,” she says.
“Experiences like divorce, grief journeys, and menopause retreats are meant to create a pocket of sacred time, centered around intense emotion. These are our new boundaries.”
“People want to go through these times and come out renewed,” says Bina. “This is a huge opportunity for the tourism sector to bring meaning and experience to a whole new level. »
Credit, Getty Images
6. Disconnected destinations
“More and more tourists, especially those from the anti-Instagram brigade, are fleeing crowded places that rarely live up to their clean, overly filtered online image,” says Nick Pulley, founder of tour operator Selective Asia.
Disconnected destinations are therefore on the rise. Interest has grown in places like Toledo, Spain, Brandenburg, Germany and, for the more adventurous, Iraq.
In the UK, this trend is moving people away from big tourist counties such as the Cotswolds and Cornwall in favor of less visited regions like Northumberland, Wales and Somerset, according to a report from Lemongrass.
Hilton’s trend research also identified an increase in curiosity-driven travel. Brits in particular seek exploration and personal development, even at the expense of work.
There is a growing demand for adventure, whether it is seeking authentic accommodation in Nepali homes, visiting lesser known parts of Italy or simply any area that is less touristy, but with a strong local atmosphere.
Credit, Getty Images
For Nikolova, this shift reflects the way experiences now function as a form of social currency.
“Today, with social media, experiences are much more tangible and can serve as a status signal for a long time, to larger audiences,” she explains.
“Part of this status also comes from the fact that adventure travel is seen as typical of people with richer travel CVs and who have gone beyond typical mass experiences.”
7. Literary journeys
Fueled, in part, by “#BookTok,” literary travel is expected to continue to grow in 2026, as is its sister trend, film and television-inspired travel.
Hotels around the world, even in destinations best known for their nightlife, are exploring this trend. In Spain, from Ibiza to Madrid, guests can find hotels ranging from rare books and reading retreats to poolside libraries and themed stays.
Several destinations feature in next year’s bestseller list: in the United Kingdom, Cornwall, where the new Harry Potter TV series is being filmed, and the Yorkshire moors, setting for Emerald Fennell’s next film, Wuthering Heights; and Greece, thanks to the adaptation of The Odyssey for the cinema, by Christopher Nolan.
Bina sees this trend as a form of modern escapism.
“In times of crisis or rapid change, we escape to fiction to explore our fears and desires,” she explains.
“That’s why fantasy literature had its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, when the world was at war. Science fiction became popular in the 1960s, during the space race and the counterculture era. And mythic and speculative fiction are thriving today, as we try to understand the collapse and rebirth of old systems.”
“The literary journey is like a catharsis. It helps us to immerse ourselves even more in fiction, physically and mentally,” concludes Jasmine Bina.
About The Author
