2022’s travel trends

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and it’s on the horizon! I’m talking, of course, about the annual splurge of trend-focused round-ups that appear in newspapers and magazines as one year is about to give way to the next. Wait… what did you think I meant?

With magazines working months ahead, you should already be thinking about sending out a travel-trends release if you haven’t already done so. Said release will declare some of the nascent trends to have emerged this year, predicting them to be All The Rage in 2022.

There are some obvious pitfalls to beware. Most importantly, do not declare something to be a trend that has already been widely heralded as one. Right now in travel that includes responsible tourism (as a general wish of travellers), workations or back-to-nature adventures. You need to come up with something fresh.

If you can succinctly back your alleged trend up with some client stats, even better. The default metric here tends to be year-on-year (YOY) bookings, but that’s currently made trickier by the nearly two years of inactivity we’ve just witnessed. Comparing data against 2019 or 2018’s figures seems like a more accurate indicator of whether change has occurred, so I’d suggest doing that.

By its nature, a trend must be something that’s different – a palpable change. If a surge of people are booking European holidays, that’s only significant if they weren’t previously.

Try to avoid being too blatant in terms of peddling clients. If your trend is that Italian spa holidays are up, and your client is… an Italian spa specialist, that’s convenient! It makes your assertion far less believable. Ultimately, with singular clients like that, I’d be inclined to steer clear of trends releases altogether. They’re best left to tour operators, hotel aggregators, hotel chains and the like; basically, anyone with a large pool of data to analyse.

Final thing: do not, under any circumstances, suggest forest bathing. That was a trend in 2004. It’s really not now.

In a similar vein, next week I’ll cover hot-destination round-ups…