Condé Nast Traveller Announces Travel Trends for 2024
LONDON – Today, Condé Nast Traveller, the global authority on high-end travel, has shared the trends that will shape travel in 2024.
In 2024, travellers will be putting what’s important to them front and centre of their plans, valuing deeper experiences that leave a positive impact, time spent with loved ones, and wellness moments that last well after checkout.
Trends expected to make an impact in 2024 include:
- AI aims to be your sidekick
- Frontier tourism
- Gig tripping
- Wild feasting
- Back of house tours
- Biohacking
- Astro tourism
- Coolcationing
The full list of twenty Condé Nast Traveller trends is below, with accompanying article here: https://www.cntraveller.com/article/travel-trends-2024
AI aims to be your sidekick
If 2023 was the year of AI chatbots wanting to plan your trips, 2024 will be all about how AI aspires to be your travel sidekick. A wave of new AI-powered features and products aims to support travellers on the ground – all while raising concerns around the potential negative impacts as AI becomes more widely integrated with our travels.
Plan-free travel
Saying no to endless scrolling to plan every inch of a trip, and saying yes to spontaneity instead. The power of the algorithm-spawned era of Fomo travel is waning, with those once secret spots made Insta-famous becoming tired and cookie-cutter, and the drive to plan a trip around them losing momentum. The rising counter movement is travel with no plans at all.
Private group travel
The post-pandemic desire to gather friends or family and embark on a shared holiday experience shows no sign of abating – in fact, it’s on the increase in luxury travel, as people appreciate the benefits and savour the moment, from 3G family groups to 50-something empty-nesters keen to rekindle life-long friendships. Just don’t take Succession’s family outing to Tuscany as a role model.
Frontier tourism
To go above and beyond. Or below and under. As crossings of the tumultuous Drake Passage to Antarctica rack up millions of TikTok views and traffic jams form on Everest, canny travellers are seeking more individual, less obvious experiences that combine thrill-seeking with more meaningful self-empowerment.
Peak season gets the cold shoulder
There’s been a dramatic increase in shoulder season travel to Europe’s most popular destinations (particularly France, Spain, the UK and Italy), which is set to continue in 2024. Luxury travel specialists Original Travel has launched new shoulder season itineraries to locations traditionally in demand during the summer – including the crystalline seascapes of Sardinia and Corsica – after seeing 14 per cent more bookings for September 2023 than for August 2023.
Coolcationing
For the vast majority of folk, summer holidays used to be about following the sun, seeking the heat – watching the mercury climb and hitting the sands. With the intense, record-breaking temperatures of recent years, however, many are considering travelling in the opposite direction: booking "coolcations" in temperate destinations, which also benefit from being less crowded.
Sports tourism
No longer the domain of lads on tour keen to sink as many pints as possible with one eye on a football game, sports tourism has evolved in the past few years with a new generation – and type – of sports fan emerging thanks to glossy TV documentaries (Formula 1: Drive to Survive, we’re looking at you). Now, we’re taking our fandom out of the house and following a host of different sports in destinations across the world, planning holidays that hinge around seeing games, races and other activities in exotic locales, and extending trips on either side to see the sights too.
Gig tripping
For years, athletes and wellness gurus were the big headliners at retreats. But rock stars are, well, the new rock stars of travel. Call it the Swift Effect. Destination concert business is up more than 50 per cent, led mostly by Taylor Swift, says Janel Carnero, a travel advisor at Embark Beyond. In the USA, tickets for Swift’s Eras Tour cost thousands and were still impossible to score. Music fans are realising they can pay less and have a more memorable experience by seeing their favourite pop icons perform in say, Amsterdam or Milan.
Urban gardens
Never mind the biophilic office and those pot plants you forget to water: whole cities are going green as architects and planners create leafy microclimates amid the grey concrete to help keep us cooler, connect communities and even feed us.
Home swapping
Increasingly, discerning travellers are looking to stay away for longer stretches, while the rise of remote jobs post-pandemic means that working and living abroad has never been more appealing. The catch? Forking out on hefty accommodation fees while you’re at it. Enter home swapping: the perfect solution to guarantee yourself a (free) home abroad while you offer up your own in exchange – for weeks or even months at a time.
Skip-gen travel
Skip-gen travel describes when grandparents holiday with grandchildren, in other words, "skipping" a generation. In the past few months, I've had around twice as many enquiries as usual for grandchild/grandchild bookings,
says Clio Wood, founder of family retreat company &Breathe.
Restaurateur-owned hotels
Restaurants and hotels are the two linchpins of the hospitality industry. And naturally, the two are often intertwined on one premises. Until recently, though, most hotels weren’t started or owned by restaurateurs. Yet as food-focused travel keeps increasing, with people hankering for the next hot reservation and planning entire trips around discovering a culture through its food, it makes sense that restaurateurs are adding hotelier to their CVs – and ensuring their new properties have impressive food offerings.
Train stations are the new food destinations
Train stations around the world are usually passed through as quickly as possible, having not been designed for commuters to stay and hang out. Nowadays, as travel delays increase and visitors want more local experiences, it pays for train stations to welcome travellers with shops, restaurants and bars for them to explore. In an effort to create a more dynamic visitor experience, historic train stations are being revamped, with bespoke food and drink offerings as an integral part of the redesign.
Wild feasting
Have you ever noticed how food always tastes better outdoors? But in today’s modern world many of us are more used to eating a sandwich while staring at a screen. Wild feasting describes the trend for beautifully curated culinary experiences in natural environments with the incorporation of hyper-local and foraged ingredients.
Train travel gets glam
Rising climate consciousness has fuelled a rail travel revival, the luxury train niche is reaching new heights of popularity, extravagance and ambition. Travel booking platforms are reporting growing demand for luxury rail trips, where the journey is, yes, the destination. In fact, new design-forward train lines increasingly rival the finest hotels for the culinary experiences and bells and whistles on offer.
Back of house tours
Greener hotels giving us a look behind the scenes to show us – not just tell us – they're sustainable. We don't mean a look-see at solar panels or composting, but heart-lifting experiential tours that help us appreciate why it matters to support socio-economic uplift through tourism.
Eco diving
A rise in divers choosing their travel destinations based on the sustainability of the scuba centres, and having a more positive, regenerative impact on the ocean once there.
Biohacking
Longevity is the latest wellness buzzword thanks to best-selling books such as Outlive and the hit Netflix documentary Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. Between 2021 and 2022, venture-capital investment in longevity clinics more than doubled from $27 million to $57 million globally, according to analysis from longevity research and media company Longevity.Technology. Now, the science of extending life and optimising health has become the focus at hotels.
Astro tourism
Astro tourism, or starbathing, is the act of travelling with the aim of catching sight of astronomical phenomena – disappearing to lands devoid of any pollution, crowds and traffic, where we can focus solely on the skies above and while away hours gazing at the stars, planets and constellations overhead.
Silent travel
In an age of overstimulation, silence might be just what we need from our travels in 2024. Offering a chance to restore and reset, silent travel represents a more mindful kind of trip, one that doesn’t leave you needing a holiday to recover from your holiday.
To see the full list and why these trends will matter in 2024, visit: https://www.cntraveller.com/article/travel-trends-2024.
About Condé Nast Traveler
Condé Nast Traveller – As the most discerning, up-to-the-minute voice in all things travel, Condé Nast Traveller is the global citizen's bible and muse, offering both inspiration and vital intel. We understand that time is the greatest luxury, which is why Condé Nast Traveller mines its network of experts and influencers so that you never waste a meal, a drink or a hotel stay wherever you are in the world.
