This article originally appeared on Amadeus.
In this article, Contributing Editor Martin Cowen examines the ongoing transformation of the travel industry, shaped by the personal journeys of travelers, the rise of transformative technologies, and significant global changes. As demand for travel continues to climb, ongoing success hinges on deeply understanding travelers’ shifting needs and preferences. Embracing new technologies, collaborating across the sector, and proactively adapting to broader challenges are all essential for delivering richer, more responsive travel experiences and ensuring the industry’s continued growth.
The travel experience is being transformed by technology innovations covering software and hardware. For software, we’re talking about the offline to online shift, web to smartphone, static keyword search to dynamic conversational search. Hardware is less easy to pin down but think in terms of infrastructure – biometric gates at airports, high-speed trains, alternative accommodations.
There are many questions which can be asked about the travel experience – here are some of them…
Who is experiencing travel?
The short answer – lots of people! UN Tourism (formerly UNWTO) said that nearly 1.4 billion people travelled internationally with an overnight stay in 2024. And, while no one has a crystal ball, Airports Council International believes that, in twenty years’ time there will be 17.7 billion international air passengers, and 22.3 billion by 2053.
A previous post in this series noted that each of these travelers is an individual with a variety of contextual and situational personas. There is no longer any such thing a “typical” traveler (if there ever was) and that’s a challenge mainly for suppliers. For sellers, tech has and continues to transform the search-shop-book-pay experience but the actual real-world physical experience of travel is in the hands of the suppliers – the accommodation sector, airlines and airports.
What’s key is that the overall appetite for travel in the short and long term is strong. If predictions pan out, there will be more travelers traveling more often. What’s important is that all industry stakeholders find ways to work together and harness technology to understand what these travelers want and to deliver seamless end-to-end experiences even better than we do today.
The ecosystem needs to be able to transition and transform in synch with ever-changing traveler preferences. Many businesses are fronting up to the transformation challenge on their own terms, but there’s a growing awareness that partnerships can drive a collective improvement in how the industry engages with the traveler.
What are they travelling to experience?
A recent WEF report identifies live tourism, eco-tourism and wellness as three growth sectors, with a CAGR to 2030 in value of 16%, 14% and 8% respectively.
All these sectors featured in 2024/2025 trends reports from booking.com and Skyscanner. Amadeus has also referenced eco-tourism and wellness in its trend reports over the years.
Live tourism is a relatively new term for an established trend. Amadeus data around Taylor Swift’s APAC tour in 2023 quantified how important live tourism can be to destinations on the mega-star circuit. But there has always been people travelling for specific sporting and musical events. The difference today is that, enabled by technology, more and more people are traveling to experience an experience.
This is a disruption happening in plain sight and which has the potential to transform the travel industry. At PCW Europe’s recent conference in Barcelona, a panel featuring Amadeus, Hyatt Hotels and booking.com all said that they were seeing a shift where travelers were making decisions based on what they would experience, their emotional response and the memories they would make, rather than committing to a specific destination at a prescribed time as has traditionally been the case. Travelers are becoming proactive, taking ownership of their experience, rather than reactive, expecting the destination and the travel industry to provide whatever experience it is the destination and travel industry thinks the traveler wants.
When and where do travelers want to have the experience?
By its very nature, live tourism takes place at a dedicated time and place. If I want to experience a test match in Melbourne, there are a limited number of dates that I can do that. See also: Glastonbury, Coachella, The Salzburg Festival, 2026 FIFA World Cup, and so on. These events are often seen as a lead gen for wider tourism engagement, with varying degrees of commitment and success.
Elsewhere, there is a great clamor in the industry around “shoulder seasons” and “off-peak” travel. Proponents argue that this will help address overtourism by flattening the demand curve, allowing the economic benefits of tourism to be spread across the year, and encourage destinations to consider year-round tourism infrastructure.
But the factors determining when most people travel are non-negotiable and are not as discretionary and flexible as the DMOs and OTAs would like. In the UK and many parts of Europe, there is a six-to-eight-week peak season in the summer because that’s when the schools are closed (and, back in the day, when factories closed for a fortnight). Until there is a significant shift in how the school year is organized, this peak will remain for many travelers.
Overall, cultural and social phenomenon dictate the peak travel windows. Scandinavians flock to Thailand in February to escape the winter, leaving them to holiday at home in summer. “Les Grandes Vacances” is still a part of the French travel mindset. Elsewhere, Chinese outbound gets a bump every year during Golden Week.
There is some merit to the idea of shoulder season and off-peak, but arguments that it is cheaper for travelers ignore supply and demand economics. If more people are encouraged to visit Tenerife in November rather than during August, airlines, hotels, restaurants and taxis will be tempted to raise their prices.
And there’s an element of rearranging the overtourism deckchairs – if a destination struggles with hundreds of thousands of visitors in July, then there’s no guarantee it can cope with tens of thousands in March.
Many DMOs are putting resources into persuading tourists to consider visiting lesser known places and attractions, and destination dupes is a recognized travel trend. These micro-disruptions to the established norm are to be welcomed, but there is one factor however that will have a truly transformational impact – at scale – on the when and where of the global travel experience, and that is the shifting dynamics of our environment.
One trend that is emerging as the planet warms is the coolcation – the idea that travelers are avoiding destinations where extreme heat is a possibility and choosing somewhere more temperate. Coolcations have blipped the radar of publications such as Vogue, The New York Times and Strait Times. As global temperatures rise, some currently popular destinations may be put into question in the traveler’s mind and even become less suitable for large-scale tourism.
Global heating will inevitably shift not only the seasonality but also the destination choices for many leisure travelers, or at least those who have some flexibility. The global demand for travel is on an upward trajectory and finding suitable destinations for billions of travelers in changing environmental circumstances will be truly transformative – opening up new destinations, new experiences and new revenue streams.
How will people travel?
The global leisure tourism industry relies on commercial aviation to get travelers to and from their destination, and that is unlikely to change in our lifetime.
The conundrum here is that aviation remains difficult to decarbonize and currently contributes to the global warming that is impacting the long-term sustainability of many established destinations.
Sustainable aviation fuels have the potential over the longest of terms to make a difference, and there’s some interesting POCs and test flights taking place around electric aircraft and hydrogen-powered flights. Virgin Atlantic’s Flight 100 – “the world’s first 100% SAF flight from London Heathrow to New York JFK” – is evidence that SAF can be an alternative to fossil fuels, but there has been little obvious follow-up since the flight took place in November 2023.
Hybrid air vehicles are another option. European regional carrier Air Nostrum Group has ordered 20 “hybrid air vehicles” from Airlander. These aircraft/airship crossovers – designed for short-haul – claim a “90% reduction in per-passenger emissions compared to conventional aircraft in similar roles.”
There are other non-air options for travelers, but currently not at scale. Rail holidays are a growing option, if your origin and destination are within reach of a high-speed rail network. There’s a lot of activity in the ground and sea transportation sector which gives travelers another option to travel without flying.
The “road trip” could also be in line for a resurgence – once we are all driving electric vehicles (using charging networks powered by renewable energy) then driving becomes a low-carbon option. Already there’s a growing market for electric camper vans and electrically-powered trailers.
Takeaway for the travel industry
Changes to the who, what, where, why, how and when of travel reflects the unparalleled rate of change that we are seeing across all aspects of life. Among these changes, one constant is that travel will remain part of the human experience. The demand for travel is here to stay.
Sellers, suppliers and the tech ecosystem supporting them need to ensure that the industry can serve and satisfy the preferences of billions of individual travelers, and this can only be delivered if all of us accept that transformation is non-negotiable. Standing still while the world moves on is not an option.
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to digital transformation in the travel industry, there are some areas of consistency. Thinking differently about your products, source markets, or mission statements, can help identify priority areas for transformation; rethinking the role of partnerships and collaborations can speed up innovation and time to market for new initiatives; technology is making it easier to strategize, deliver and execute a transformation plan. The target for all these inputs should be a positive and beneficial impact.
Across this series I’ve tried to outline an outside-looking-in perspective on the theory and practice of transformation as it applies to travel, technology and travel technology. And while no-one is blind to the challenges ahead, the tailwinds are stronger than the headwinds. Great opportunities are there for the taking, and businesses committed to transforming will be at the head of the queue.
Disclaimer: All opinions expressed are solely of contributing editor, Martin Cowen, and do not necessarily express the views of Amadeus.
Martin Cowen Martin is a highly experienced (25yrs+) B2B writer/editor/moderator specializing in the global travel technology industry. As a journalist, he has worked for e-tid.com, tnooz.com, Travolution, Airline Business, Buying Business Travel, APEX, and more. He is based in Margate, Kent, UK.
