I used to measure travel by the number of countries stamped in my passport. Three cities in five days. Five countries in two weeks. It felt like achievement. It also felt like running through a museum with your eyes closed.
Something shifted in 2024. Maybe it was the summer of overtourism—Barcelona residents spraying tourists with water, Venice implementing its day-tripper fee, Kyoto's Gion district turning into a human traffic jam. Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe we just got tired.
According to Skift Research's 2025 Travel Outlook report, travel companies are anticipating a 24% rise in the number of trips people are planning this year. But here's the twist: people aren't necessarily taking more vacations. They're making the ones they do take last longer.
Skift is calling 2025 "the year of long getaways." Globally, long leisure trips now rank as the most popular type of travel—ahead of weekend getaways, ahead of road trips, ahead of the quick city breaks that dominated the 2010s. The trend is particularly pronounced in China, India, and Germany. Even in the US, where vacation days remain stingy compared to the rest of the developed world, one quarter of respondents told Skift they expect to take a long international or cross-continental vacation this year.
Julia Carter, founder of luxury travel company Craft Travel, put it bluntly: "Travellers are over the frenzy of taking photos in wildly packed tourist sites or iconic hotels just to say they've been there."
I keep thinking about that phrase—"just to say they've been there." How much of modern travel has been performative? The Instagram post from the Santorini sunset. The check-in at the Parisian café. The Stories from the Tokyo Shibuya Crossing. We've been collecting destinations like Pokémon cards, and somewhere along the way, we forgot to actually experience the places we were visiting.
The data backs up this exhaustion with numbers. Zicasso, a high-end travel planning company, reports that average trip duration for luxury travelers has crept up to 13.5 days in 2025—from 13.4 days in 2024. That 0.1 day increase sounds trivial until you pair it with this: 76.2% of Zicasso respondents now prefer single-country trips. Not multi-country European tours. Not "see Italy and France in ten days" packages. One country. One deep dive.
Zicasso's CEO Brian Tan calls this "depth over breadth." I call it sanity.
There's something almost rebellious about choosing to stay put. In August 2024, the director of a viral tourism advert for Oslo told the BBC he'd always prefer sitting at someone's kitchen table drinking milk to pit-stopping at tourist traps. That quote stuck with me. The kitchen table. The milk. The radical act of not moving.
I've been trying to understand why this resonates so strongly now. Part of it is practical: air travel has become miserable. The lines, the fees, the shrinking seats, the general indignity of modern aviation. Every flight is a small trauma. If you're going to subject yourself to that, you might as well make it worth the pain. Stay long enough that the jet lag actually resolves before you have to do it again.
But it's more than logistics. I think we're witnessing a kind of travel recalibration. The pandemic taught us that experiences matter more than possessions. The cost-of-living crisis taught us that money is finite and should be spent deliberately. And the overtourism backlash taught us—sometimes harshly—that locals in popular destinations are tired of being background characters in our vacation photos.
There's an ethical dimension to slow travel that doesn't get discussed enough. When you spend two weeks in a single city instead of two days, you're spreading your tourist dollars further. You're learning enough of the language to say please and thank you. You're finding the restaurant that doesn't have an English menu because it doesn't need one. You're becoming—dare I say it—a temporary local rather than a permanent visitor.
Skift's report also highlights the rise of "blended travel"—the mush-mouth portmanteau of "bleisure" that describes trips mixing work and leisure. I hate the word, but I understand the phenomenon. If you're already paying for accommodation in Lisbon or Mexico City, why not extend your stay by a few days and actually see the place? The laptop has made us mobile. We might as well use that mobility to linger.
I keep coming back to something a friend told me after spending three weeks in Buenos Aires. "I finally understood the city," she said. "Not the tourist version. The actual city. The way the light hits the buildings at 5 PM. The bakery that runs out of medialunas by 10 AM. The old man who feeds the pigeons in Plaza San Martín every morning. You can't get that in a weekend."
She's right. You can't.
The slow travel movement isn't about being pretentious. It's not about gatekeeping who gets to call themselves a "real" traveler. It's about recognizing that the checklist approach—the seven countries in fourteen days, the photo at every landmark, the constant motion—delivers diminishing returns. After a while, all cathedrals blur together. All museums become rooms with old things in them. All cities become interchangeable backdrops for your content.
What replaces that blur is specificity. The particular way coffee is served in Portugal. The specific silence of a Japanese garden at dawn. The exact quality of light in the Scottish Highlands at golden hour. These things require time. They require repetition. They require you to stop trying to see everything and start trying to actually see something.
I'm not immune to the anxiety that comes with this approach. There's a fear, I think, that if you don't see everything, you're somehow failing at travel. That you're wasting your one chance to be in Rome or Bangkok or Cape Town. But the opposite is true. The more you try to see, the less you actually observe. The more you move, the less you experience.
2025 feels like a reckoning with that truth. The numbers don't lie—people are planning fewer, longer trips. They're choosing depth over breadth. They're sitting at kitchen tables drinking milk instead of sprinting between tourist traps.
I don't know if this is a permanent shift or a pendulum swing. Travel trends are fickle. Next year we might all be back to country-hopping and passport-stamp collecting. But I hope not. I hope the slow travel revolution sticks around. I hope we keep choosing to stay longer, dig deeper, and actually be present in the places we visit.
The world isn't going anywhere. Neither should we.
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Marcus Chen
