AD | Travel is no longer just about ticking destinations off a list. Increasingly, travellers are choosing more immersive travel formats that prioritise participation, restoration, and meaningful connection over passive sightseeing. The way people travel is changing more quickly than at any point in recent memory. And the experiences gaining ground share a common thread – they ask more of the traveller and give back considerably more in return.
Contents
4 Fastest-Growing Travel Formats
From long-distance walking holidays and small-ship sailing trips to food-focused escapes and nature immersion retreats, the fastest-growing holidays are those that encourage people to engage more deeply with the places they visit and return home feeling genuinely changed by the experience.
Walking Holidays
Long-distance walking holidays have been growing steadily for over a decade and show no signs of plateauing. The reasons are fairly well understood at this point – the combination of physical activity, natural environment, and enforced disconnection from ordinary life produces a quality of restoration that sedentary travel consistently fails to deliver, and word has got around.
What’s less often noted is the breadth of the audience that walking holidays now attract. It’s no longer a format associated primarily with experienced hikers or outdoor enthusiasts. It’s become mainstream in a way that cycling and sailing have not quite managed, partly because the barrier to entry is so low – if you can walk, you can do it – and partly because the infrastructure around it, particularly in Europe, has developed to the point where comfort and challenge are no longer mutually exclusive.
Small-Ship Sailing
Small-ship and traditional vessel sailing holidays are experiencing a revival that’s been building quietly for several years and is now becoming difficult to ignore. The gulet – the broad-beamed traditional wooden sailing vessel developed on the Turkish and Croatian coasts – has become the defining vessel of this format in the Adriatic, and the growth in demand for Croatia gulet holidays specifically reflects a broader shift in what people want from a Mediterranean trip.
The appeal is straightforward: a gulet puts you on the water rather than beside it, takes you to places that are inaccessible by any other means, and organises your week around the rhythms of wind and tide rather than the rhythms of tourist infrastructure. It is slow travel in the most literal sense, and it produces a quality of experience that land-based alternatives struggle to match.
“The formats growing fastest are the ones that put the traveller back in contact with the world rather than managing the distance between them.”
Food and Drink Tourism
Trips organised primarily around eating and drinking have moved from niche to mainstream over the past five years in a way that reflects a broader shift in how people think about the relationship between travel and culture.
A wine tour through Burgundy or a cooking week in Puglia is no longer an eccentric choice – it’s an increasingly common answer to the question of what kind of holiday to take when you want something more engaging than a beach and more immersive than a city break.
The food tourism sector has responded with a dramatically expanded range of offers, from single-day market visits to week-long residencies with professional chefs in working farmhouses.
What drives this format is the same thing that drives walking holidays and sailing trips – the desire for an experience organised around doing something rather than simply being somewhere. Food is one of the most direct routes into the culture of a place, and spending time learning to cook it, source it, or understand it properly produces a relationship with a destination that sightseeing cannot replicate.
Wellness and Nature Immersion
The wellness travel category is growing rapidly but unevenly – the end of it that involves expensive spa resorts and curated retreat programmes is a different proposition from the end that simply involves spending extended time in natural environments with limited connectivity.
It is the latter that is showing the more interesting growth, driven by an increasingly well-documented understanding of what time in natural settings does to stress levels, sleep quality, and cognitive function.
Forest bathing programmes in Scandinavia, wild swimming itineraries in Scotland, and multi-day nature immersion trips in national parks across Europe are all growing formats sharing a simple premise: that proximity to the natural world is restorative in ways that built environments cannot replicate, and that most people in most modern cities are significantly underexposed to it.
What connects all of these growing travel formats is a shift in what travellers are optimising for. The previous generation of travel was largely optimised for novelty – new places, new experiences, new photographs. The formats gaining ground now are optimised for depth, for restoration, and for the quality of engagement that only comes from doing something rather than merely seeing it. That shift is structural rather than cyclical, and the travel industry is only beginning to catch up with it.
* This is a collaborative post – please see my Disclaimer.
Leave a Reply