Appetite for travel is not the problem. Omio’s third annual NowNext report, one of the year’s most closely watched travel trends studies, built with YouGov surveys of 8,505 adults across six countries, finds 49 percent of Americans want to travel more often — up sharply from 34 percent in 2025 — while 62 percent expect to take a leisure trip within twelve months. What is changing is how those trips are designed: multi-stop, heat-aware and planned around personal passions.
Pick-and-Mix Travel Takes Over
The report’s signature trend is the multi-stop holiday: travellers chaining destinations together — a train to another city, a ferry to an island — rather than basing themselves in one place. Fifty-two percent of Americans plan or seriously consider such a trip. Alongside it comes a counter-trend: a third of Americans find returning to familiar places more appealing than they did a few years ago, and a quarter prefer destinations that are simply easy to reach and navigate.
Money management runs through every answer. Seventy-six percent of travellers expect to take at least one cost-saving action, led by hunting flexible deals — yet Americans simultaneously show stronger willingness than other markets to spend on their personal passions. The full findings are in the TravelDailyNews summary of the Omio report.
Heat Joins Price as a Planning Factor
Perhaps the most 2026 detail in the report is that weather extremes are now a first-order planning input: 68 percent of Americans consider disruption when planning, and heat-aware choices — shoulder seasons, cooler destinations, flexible bookings that can move — are reshaping the calendar. The old peak-season logic, in which everyone travelled when the weather was most extreme, is quietly breaking.
Domestic travel still dominates intentions, with 73 percent of Americans expecting to travel within the US, while Europe leads international interest at 28 percent and Asia follows at 19 percent. The composite picture is of a traveller who is more deliberate in every dimension: route, season, budget and purpose all get consciously chosen.
Travel Trends Point to Personalisation as the Product
Underneath the individual trends sits a structural one: the standard package is dissolving. Travellers assemble trips from components — rail passes, boutique stays, one splurge experience — and expect platforms to help them personalise rather than prescribe. The report’s six trends all point the same way: agency is moving from the operator to the traveller.
For the industry, the message is to sell flexibility as a feature, not an upsell: changeable tickets, mix-and-match itineraries and honest heat guidance may matter more to 2027’s customer than another loyalty tier. More trend coverage is available in the blog’s travel and lifestyle archive.
The traveller of 2027 is not travelling less, cheaper or simpler — they are travelling more deliberately, with itineraries that bend around weather, wallets and whims. Reports like NowNext matter because they catch the change while it is still a choice, before it hardens into the new normal everyone else must follow.
