2025 Travel Trends: What to Expect in the Year Ahead
A new year is just around the corner, and with it comes a host of new ways to see the world.
Truth be told, the new ways are a lot like the old ways, but that’s okay because there was nothing really wrong with the old ways.
Here are some of the trends to watch for in 2025. (Spoiler alert: Fire up that trip planning note document - it’s going to be a long one.)
The rise of "digital detox" destinations
The idea of getting away from it all has always been a prime travel motivator. These days there’s so much more to get away from, which makes the idea of a digital-detox vacation so … well, intoxicating.
How does it work? In its simplest form, you go somewhere with poor cell service and no internet and just be.
Many places around the world fit the bill, from mountaintops to deserts to deep woods to your parking garage.
If you like high-altitude getaways, consider vacationing in the Andes or the Atlas Mountains. For deserts, choose from the Moroccan Sahara, Mongolia’s Gobi, a place like Tierra Atacama in the high deserts of South America, or a mindfulness resort like Amangiri at Canyon Point, Utah.
And if it’s forested getaways you want, consider northern Canada, Alaska, or the forests of Japan, where you can engage in Shinrin-Yoku, or “forest therapy.”
Accommodations vary across the digital-detox sphere, but the goal is the same: letting you unplug, relax, and swap the digital world for the tangible.
Personalized wellness experiences using health data
All that health data your wearables churn out has to be producing something better than ads for at home exercise equipment. A personalized wellness experience might be one.
Hotels are already talking about using data from your sleep tracker to personalize a room for you, and as semi-creepy as that sounds, that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.
How about destinations that offer hyperbaric or cryogenic therapy facilities or access to your favorite Krav Maga workouts? Or something simpler: How about a destination that tailors your menu to your wellness specs?
Wellness travel is growing – as much as 36% year-over-year, according to Forbes – so expect to see more places like the Lanserhof Tegernsee in Germany and Amanpuri in Phuket, Thailand, which provide biometric-based programs to help with things like chronic-condition management.
These are really New Age spins on the classic spa vacation with an added layer of data-driven personalization. But if you’re choosing to be monitored and observed, why not enjoy a nice massage as part of the experience—right?
Increased interest in ancestral tourism and DNA travel
Speaking of data use and travel, as long as you’re sharing all your family history with a genealogy service, you may as well get a good trip out of it.
Vacations to the Old Sod have always been popular among people interested in genealogy. Now that this information is so much more accessible, more people are heading back to their ancestral homelands to answer the question, “So why did my ancestors leave this for the Lower East Side?”
You may not find any long-lost ancestors on these trips, but you may find something more important: A renewed sense of place.
Rise of "Zoom towns" and digital-nomad villages
If you could live anywhere and still do your job, why wouldn’t you?
That’s the vexing question for many people who say, “what the heck” and become digital nomads.
While the term “digital nomad” suggests someone with a camper van and a portable cell tower, the term and the lifestyle have morphed. Now, you’re more likely to find groups of digital nomads like clumps of wildflowers dotting the overseas landscape.
Some of the “digital villages,” like Tulum, are close to the U.S. Some, like Bend, Oregon, and Missoula, Montana, are actually in the U.S. However, many are on the European continent, especially in warm-weather hangouts like Spain and Portugal.
The advantage of many of these digital-nomad communities is that they’re very nice places to visit. You can check them out, see how they appeal to you, talk to the local nomads or keep to yourself and enjoy the location on your lonesome., You can actually dabble a toe in the experience without having to shove all your stuff in a storage unit and hunt for a Wi-Fi signal.
Among the destinations to explore are:
· Medellín, Colombia
· Split and Hvar, Croatia
· Queenstown, New Zealand
· Marrakech, Morocco
· Cape Town, South Africa
· Aarhus, Denmark
· Madeira, Portugal
· Granada, Spain
The 10 Best Destinations for Digital Nomads Ranked
“Slow travel” and traveling to less classically “touristy” destinations
Like many trends, slow travel has been around a long time. Take Lewis and Clark – classic slow travelers. It’s not like this stuff was just invented.
Also, “slow” is the new fast, whether you’re talking about food, media (books, records, and magazines), exercise (walking backwards, yoga, and pickleball), or travel.
So, another way to think of slow travel is as a leisurely pace, perfect for those who prefer to take their time.
There are so many ways to travel slow, whether it’s hiking, biking, paddling, taking the backroads, or taking the local train from point A to point B, stopping in all points between.
The beauty of slow travel is that if you want to stop somewhere, go ahead and stop. Nothing says you can’t, and a total of zero people care whether your stopping place gets eight visits a day or 800,000.
So many of us are separated out in the normal travel method of booking it right to your destination. We need a stretch of two-lane road bordered tight by farm fields, woods and cemeteries.
On a global level, we don’t need a trip that takes us to 15 destinations in five days; we need one that takes us to five destinations in 15 days. And not the same old T-shirt shops, either. Different T-shirt shops in different countries.
Travel like this takes intentionality. It means seeking out the tour operator or cruise that takes it slow – and they’re not easy to find in this crowded travel marketplace (though a good travel professional can help).
The Slow Travel Trend: What it is and How it Works
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