Why we travel now: revenge travel was never the story

At some point between 2020 and 2022, travel stopped being something people do and became something people are

Across the world's most visited destinations, something started looking wrong around 2023. The seasonal rhythms that had always governed tourism — the summer peaks, the quiet winters, the predictable ebb and flow — stopped behaving as expected. Demand wasn't surging and receding. It was holding. Off-seasons that should have offered relief didn't. Waitlists stretched across months. Cities that had learned to manage tourist pressure in July found themselves managing it in February.

This was not a correction running long. This was something new.

The industry had called it revenge travel and moved on. But the travelers didn't move on. They kept coming — and they're still coming, in numbers that were never supposed to last this long.

Why the revenge travel frame made sense — and why it didn't hold

The revenge travel narrative was reasonable in the circumstances. People had been confined for two years. Of course they wanted out. The assumption that demand would surge and then normalize wasn't careless — it was the logical read of a temporary disruption. Pent-up demand has a natural ceiling. You release it, it exhausts itself, and the market finds equilibrium.

What that reading missed was the assumption buried inside it: that the pandemic had interrupted a stable baseline of behavior, and that once the disruption passed, people would return to traveling broadly as they had before.

The evidence accumulated quickly against that assumption. Travelers returning from 2022 onward weren't behaving like people satisfying a craving. According to data from the UNWTO and McKinsey, they were spending more per trip, trading up on experience quality with a consistency that didn't look like a temporary splurge, and demonstrating a price sensitivity — or rather, a lack of it — that few had anticipated. The arrival numbers were striking. The spending behavior was telling a different, richer story.

The correction the industry had anticipated in volume didn't materialize. And the travelers who did arrive turned out to be more commercially valuable than the models had assumed. Something had changed in what they were there for.

Three shifts that were already in motion

The pandemic didn't create new traveler behavior. It accelerated behavior that was already forming, compressing years of gradual change into a single, decisive break.

The first shift was the move from owning to experiencing. For well over a decade, consumer spending had been moving away from possessions and toward experiences — the idea that how you spend your time matters more than what you accumulate. Especially among younger and more urban populations, travel was already becoming a larger share of wallet and a higher priority in how people organized their lives and their money.

The second was identity. Social media had spent a decade turning destinations into personal statements. Where you went said something about who you were. The aspirational travel photograph wasn't frivolous — it was a clear signal of values, taste, and sense of self. Travel was already migrating from leisure activity to identity category before 2020 arrived.

The third was remote work. Still marginal before the pandemic, but growing — and quietly dissolving the old constraints on how often and how far people could realistically travel. The decoupling of where you work from where you live had begun.

Then came two years of enforced stillness. Two years of the same walls, the same screen, the same stunted radius. Two years during which a large share of the population confronted, with unusual clarity, the question of what they actually wanted from their lives. When restrictions lifted, they didn't re-enter the world as the travelers they had been before. They re-entered it with travel reframed — not as an annual reward for hard work, but as a primary expression of how they wanted to live.

A behavioral reset of that depth doesn't unwind.

Overtourism as signal, not failure

The overcrowding that has dominated destination management conversations since 2023 is most often framed as a planning failure. Too many visitors, insufficient infrastructure, inadequate regulation of tourist flows. That framing isn't wrong. But it treats overtourism as an operational problem rather than asking what it reveals about the nature of the demand driving it.

Residents of Barcelona have hung signs from their balconies telling tourists to go home. The Canary Islands have seen mass protests. These are not the symptoms of a demand surge that arrived unexpectedly and will pass. They are the visible consequence of a structural shift in how a generation of people allocates its time, money, and sense of self — concentrated on a finite number of places that feel, to that generation, worth going to.

The pressure is not easing because the demand is not easing. Understanding why is more useful than waiting for it to stop.

What it means to build for this traveler

The revenge travel narrative gave the industry a framework that asked very little of it. A temporary surge calls for smarter pricing, not strategic repositioning. Capture the margin, wait for normalization. It was a comfortable read of an uncomfortable moment.

The correct read is less comfortable and more interesting. A generation of travelers for whom travel is a primary expression of identity — operating in a world where remote work has removed the old constraints on movement and the shift from owning to experiencing has redirected how people spend — represents a demand picture the industry has not navigated before.

Not a boom to be harvested. A floor to be built on.

The articles that follow examine what drove this shift, layer by layer: the move from ownership to experience, the role of identity in how destinations are chosen, the disappearance of social space in modern cities and what it has done to our need to escape them, and the deeper structural forces ensuring that none of this reverses. Each one carries commercial implications for how hospitality is conceived, priced, and experienced.

The signal was always there. This series is an attempt to read it clearly.

Next in Why We Travel Now: The end of the souvenir economy

by Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher Hospitality.today

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