Time to get proactive on ‘Travel Trends’
By Casey Hanisko
Are you listening? Here are a few things I have heard some of my business clients say recently…
“My clients keep asking for Japan, but I don’t have a contact there.”; “I am looking for some cooking classes in Sicily for my client who wants to travel with her daughter.”; “We can’t get travelers to book Italy in July or August; now they all want to go in June or September.”
Getting ahead of travel trends, weaving them into your business and travel planning helps you serve your clients better, earn more revenue, and bring your travelers into places that include local people in the planning process. With that said, it is time to put on my marketing and sales hat to support some ideas for your future business planning.
What travel trends should you be proactively planning for in 2025?
Countless research articles report trends; I'll list them at the bottom. We won’t talk about wellness and experiences; we know those trends. What we’ll cover here are some ideas on trends that are future opportunities for you.
We are all travel experts, and we work with travelers every day. You see these travel trends yourself with every booking. Even if they are faint glimmers.
Skip Generation Trips or "Grand Vacations"
Yes, let's put that in quotes for clarity. "Grand"ma, Grandpa, or Grandparents vacations, those boomers want bonding travel experiences with those grandchildren. So this is skip-generation travel planning.
What does this mean for you? You could create tours that cater to this idea. And while planning those multigenerational trips for your clients, you can tease the idea of a grand vacation. "Have you taken your granddaughter on a grand vacation yet, just you two?" These trips could tap into other travel trends such as culinary travel, music travel, art or conservation experiences:
Cooking tour in Greece
A music experience in Colombia
A conservation trip to Patagonia
Perhaps even a cruise just for two
Bleisure or Extended Travel
The opportunity to work before or after a core trip or a work trip taps into the possibility of remote work. How are you making these types of trips easy for your clients? Have you tested any tours with just half days planned so people can travel and work? This could bring the price down for a tour and allow nonworking travelers time for spontaneity and their own curiosity.
Or do you have a series of perfect hotels that cater to business travelers who work from their rooms or like to work from rooftop bars, patios, or comfortable hotel lounges? Do they have good WiFi? Are they near other experiences that the bleisure traveler could experience before or after some working hours.
Travelers can then maximize their stay and flight spend. The result? They get to know a destination a little better by frequenting a local coffee shop several days in a row, experiencing a local market or, festival or art show, and slowing down a bit by staying while also realistically continuing to check in with the office or even put in half or full days.
Next To Destinations - North Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan, Rwanda
Some top trending destinations in 2024 will continue into 2025, such as Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Sweden, Finland, and Japan. Of course, destinations like Italy and France continue to top the list. However, travelers recognize and are concerned about over-tourism and weather. This means they are requesting shoulder season trips and also deciding to travel to other countries.
Offering future tours to these places will then become an important option. If you are a travel advisor or curator, have at the ready DMCs, local operators, or properties that you can work with to weave together the perfect travel itinerary for your client. Going now on FAM trips offered, extending trips yourself while traveling to fall and winter trade events, and building relationships and connections will be essential.
Get Your Event Ticket and Then Travel
Raise your hand if you know someone who traveled to see a Taylor Swift concert. How about the Olympics or the World Cup? People are centering travel decisions around key events that are important to them. Knowing what type of events your clients might be interested in can help you serve them better and even offer up the idea to them for consideration.
Perhaps you serve a luxury client, and you know a fashion show is happening in Paris and you are able to get your traveler tickets. Mention this so they know what you can do. Or, do you have travelers who are jazz music fans, and you can craft an experience around a well-known jazz festival? Or your client who loves soccer/football has always wanted to see the World Cup, and you suggest a travel experience around that.
How will AI affect travel planning?
Well, travelers are certainly using ChapGPT to get ideas, and Google continues to weave AI results at the top of their search results. This means that you or your business's expertise and personal recommendations will be necessary. Make sure your messaging mentions that. Yes, travelers can find out where to go and what to do, but your connections, insights, and knowledge of the actual travel experiences put you ahead of AI.
Travelers still are looking for others to do the work. Travel planning is complicated, and people will still trust you more than they will trust AI. Building personal relationships, communicating back and forth, taking care of the bookings and payments, choosing the right experiences, and ensuring safety are things that, right now, AI can't do.
Places with Welcoming Locals
Destinations worldwide are working hard to change their business model so that destination development work involves collaboration with local people and communities. You see the protests in places like Barcelona, Venice, Hawaii, and Amsterdam and also the reactions of the government and tourism offices with tourism taxes, limitations on numbers, and messaging that suggests certain types of tourists should just not come.
What does this mean for you? You can help by creating travel itineraries that avoid these places or at least limit the time there, or go there during more off-seasons. Discovering places that are working with locals on sustainable tourism models is also important. Places such as Finland, Bhutan, Slovenia, New Zealand, and Ecuador have had sustainable tourism at the forefront of their planning. It means they are a bit ahead of the game, already communicating respect for locals, regulating tourism, reinvesting into conservation and protection, and communicating expectations to people who visit their countries.
What Three Things Can I Do to Address These Travel Trends?
Offer products and opportunities for your travelers to extend their trips, suggest Grand Vacations get planned in the future, and start gathering a list of events and festivals in some of your key destinations that you think your travelers might be interested in.
Have you used AI yet, such as ChatGPT? I suggest you do so you understand what is coming. Then, take some time to step back and ask yourself 1) how can AI help you and your business? and 2) how is your work and offerings special and unique? Then, make sure you do that well and communicate properly.
Do your destination research to understand and develop relationships with industry connections in some of the upcoming destinations and truly understand how innovative destinations are working well with local and toward sustainable development goals.
Remember, listening to your clients and researching trends are important.
Wondering how you can leverage trends with Safari Portal? Think trend focused Lookbooks that can be shared via marketing emails. Then build out a series of itinerary templates that are focused around some particular areas so you can quickly respond to enquiries. Create some content pages that talk to these trends and start sharing them within your proposals 🚀.