Why we travel now: the city stopped being enough

How the loss of third places is driving escape travel — and why hotels that understand this are redefining what a lobby is for

Think about where you spent your time today. Most of it, in all likelihood, fell into one of two places: home or work. And if you work remotely, those two places have collapsed into one — the same desk, the same walls, the same square footage serving as both the place you perform and the place you rest.

Now think about what is missing. Not a holiday. Not a trip abroad. Something closer and more ordinary: a place to simply exist without an agenda. Somewhere that is neither home nor work, where nobody expects anything of you, where you can stay for two hours without spending much money and leave feeling, without quite being able to explain why, more like yourself.

That place — if you can find it at all — is what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called the third place. And across most modern cities, it is quietly disappearing. The consequences for how people travel turn out to be larger than anyone anticipated.

What third places were, and what replaced them

The third place, as Oldenburg described it, is neutral ground. Not the home where you carry family responsibilities, not the office where you report to a boss. The neighborhood café where the barista knows your order. The local bar where you fall into conversation with a stranger. The community park bench where you can sit undisturbed and watch the world go by.

What made these spaces valuable wasn't the close friendships formed in them. It was the opposite: the loose, low-stakes connections — the nod of recognition, the brief exchange, the shared presence with people whose names you may never know. Research consistently shows that these so-called weak ties are more important to mental health and sense of belonging than their apparent insignificance suggests. They are the texture of social life, the connective tissue between people and the places they live.

In most major cities today, that texture has been worn thin. The independent café has been replaced by a chain that treats lingering as a problem to be managed. The community pub has closed or been converted. The park bench has been redesigned, in some cases literally, to discourage people from sitting too long. Every square meter of urban space has been pulled into the logic of commerce: to occupy it, you must consume. To stay, you must keep spending.

The city has not simply lost its third places. It has sent a clear message about who its public spaces are for — and the answer, increasingly, is people in transit, not people at rest.

The escape that follows

When cities stop offering spaces to simply be, people go looking for them elsewhere. This is the connection that tends to get overlooked in conversations about why travel demand has grown so relentlessly since the pandemic: the hunger for escape is not only about wanting to see new places. For a significant share of travelers, it is about needing to find the kind of ease and belonging that their own cities have stopped providing.

The remote fjord, the small village in the hills, the quiet coastal town — these are not just beautiful destinations. They are places where the social logic is different. Where you can sit outside for an hour without buying anything. Where the pace is set by people, not commerce. Where the loose, restorative interactions that third places once provided are still part of ordinary life.

This matters for how the hospitality industry understands the demand it is serving. The traveler arriving at a property in a slower, more human-scaled place is not simply on holiday. They are recovering something. And the property that understands what they are recovering — and creates the conditions for it — is offering something more durable than a room with a good view.

The hotel lobby as third place

There is a reason that the most commercially successful new hotel concepts of the past decade share a particular characteristic: they have reimagined the lobby not as a transactional space to pass through, but as a place to stay.

The lobby that functions as a neighborhood living room — with good coffee, unhurried seating, a bar that draws locals as well as guests, programming that creates reasons to gather — is not an aesthetic choice. It is a strategic response to a genuine social gap. In cities where third places have been eroded, the hotel that creates one earns something that no loyalty program can replicate: it becomes part of how people in that neighborhood live, not just where travelers sleep.

The commercial logic compounds in both directions. A lobby that functions as a third place generates food and beverage revenue from a population that extends well beyond hotel guests. It creates a visible, lived-in energy that makes the property more attractive to the travelers it is trying to reach. It builds a local identity that is, by definition, impossible to copy and paste into a different city. And it positions the hotel as genuinely embedded in its location — which, as article two of this series argued, is precisely what the identity traveler is looking for.

The lifestyle hotel boom of recent years is not a design trend. It is a demand response. The properties gaining ground are the ones that have recognized — explicitly or intuitively — that the traveler arriving at their door is looking for something their own city has stopped offering. Space to breathe. A place to belong, briefly and without obligation.

What it means to be that place

Not every property can or should become a neighborhood hub. But every property can ask a version of the same question: does this space invite people to stay, or does it move them through?

The answer to that question shapes everything from lobby furniture to bar programming to how staff are trained to interact with guests. It is the difference between a hotel that is used and a hotel that is felt. The travelers who need what third places once provided are not a niche. They are, increasingly, most of the people walking through the door.

They are not just looking for somewhere to sleep. They are looking for somewhere to be.

Next in Why We Travel Now: The floor moved

by Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher Hospitality.today

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