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Luxury Travel Trend Watch: 2025

September 2024
Culture

Welcome to Luxury Travel Trend Watch: 2025, a Virtuoso report produced in association with travel trend forecasting agency Globetrender.

Published in September 2024, this report is a summation of the luxury travel trends first revealed by Globetrender founder and CEO Jenny Southan at the 2024 Virtuoso Symposium, held at Atlantis the Royal hotel in Dubai.

Working with global data from the 2024 Virtuoso Brand and Travel Tracker Survey, as well as the organisation’s team of in-house experts, Globetrender has identified seven luxury travel trends for 2025 including “Silver Bullet Wellness”, “Racketeering”,“F**k-it Lists”, “Wander Women” and “XZ Beta Travel”.

For travel advisors and partner brands, these trends present revenue making opportunities in a luxury travel landscape that is tilting towards younger generations (the first Generation Beta babies will be born in 2025), as well as the Asia-Pacific region (Swiss financial services company UBS predicted in summer 2024 that one-third of millionaires will come from emerging markets by 2028).

To help articulate the wide-spanning and evolving needs and desires of the luxury traveller, Globetrender has devised a proprietary “Luxury Traveller Journey Scale”, which measures how the correlation between wealth and worldliness affects an individual’s trip motivations.

For example, on one end of the spectrum there are newly minted high-networths who have travelled very little – and at the other end of the spectrum there are old money ultrahigh-net-worths who have travelled the world extensively. Considering where consumers sit on this scale is vital to predicting their future needs and behaviour.

Looking at booking data from Virtuoso members, sales made between January and April 2024 for travel in 2025 and 2026 were up 49%. What’s more, future cruise sales were up 52%, compared to transactions made during same timeframe in 2023 for future travel. Overall, high price-tag trips are increasing, with bookings over US$50,000 up 86%.

What we don’t address in this report is generative AI – and that is because we believe that for luxury travellers, the role of the human advisor will be more valuable than ever.

As Virtuoso Chairman and CEO Matthew D Upchurch recently said: “AI can be a helpful tool for travel advisors, creating efficiencies that allow them to focus on the aspects of client management that are inherently human. Our philosophy on technology remains the same: automate the predictable, so that we can humanise the exceptional.”

Contents:

  • Trend 1 Silver Bullet Wellness
  • Trend 2 Mood Boarding
  • Trend 3 XZ Beta Travel
  • Trend 4 F**k-it Lists
  • Trend 5 Wander Women
  • Trend 6 Memoirs in Motion
  • Trend 7 Racketeering

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Luxury Travel Trend Watch: 2025

September 2024
Culture

Welcome to Luxury Travel Trend Watch: 2025, a Virtuoso report produced in association with travel trend forecasting agency Globetrender.

Published in September 2024, this report is a summation of the luxury travel trends first revealed by Globetrender founder and CEO Jenny Southan at the 2024 Virtuoso Symposium, held at Atlantis the Royal hotel in Dubai.

Working with global data from the 2024 Virtuoso Brand and Travel Tracker Survey, as well as the organisation’s team of in-house experts, Globetrender has identified seven luxury travel trends for 2025 including “Silver Bullet Wellness”, “Racketeering”,“F**k-it Lists”, “Wander Women” and “XZ Beta Travel”.

For travel advisors and partner brands, these trends present revenue making opportunities in a luxury travel landscape that is tilting towards younger generations (the first Generation Beta babies will be born in 2025), as well as the Asia-Pacific region (Swiss financial services company UBS predicted in summer 2024 that one-third of millionaires will come from emerging markets by 2028).

To help articulate the wide-spanning and evolving needs and desires of the luxury traveller, Globetrender has devised a proprietary “Luxury Traveller Journey Scale”, which measures how the correlation between wealth and worldliness affects an individual’s trip motivations.

For example, on one end of the spectrum there are newly minted high-networths who have travelled very little – and at the other end of the spectrum there are old money ultrahigh-net-worths who have travelled the world extensively. Considering where consumers sit on this scale is vital to predicting their future needs and behaviour.

Looking at booking data from Virtuoso members, sales made between January and April 2024 for travel in 2025 and 2026 were up 49%. What’s more, future cruise sales were up 52%, compared to transactions made during same timeframe in 2023 for future travel. Overall, high price-tag trips are increasing, with bookings over US$50,000 up 86%.

What we don’t address in this report is generative AI – and that is because we believe that for luxury travellers, the role of the human advisor will be more valuable than ever.

As Virtuoso Chairman and CEO Matthew D Upchurch recently said: “AI can be a helpful tool for travel advisors, creating efficiencies that allow them to focus on the aspects of client management that are inherently human. Our philosophy on technology remains the same: automate the predictable, so that we can humanise the exceptional.”

Contents:

  • Trend 1 Silver Bullet Wellness
  • Trend 2 Mood Boarding
  • Trend 3 XZ Beta Travel
  • Trend 4 F**k-it Lists
  • Trend 5 Wander Women
  • Trend 6 Memoirs in Motion
  • Trend 7 Racketeering