The data behind a shift travelers already feel

Anyone who has traveled alongside younger friends or family in the last few years has probably noticed the shift anecdotally: fewer souvenirs, more spending on the experience itself. A recent, large-scale study puts real numbers behind that impression, and the scale of it is worth understanding — not just as an interesting trend, but as a signal for how trip planning itself needs to evolve.

Klook's Travel Pulse 2026 study, based on responses from roughly 11,000 travelers across markets including India, found that 88% of global travelers plan to increase or maintain their travel budgets this year, even amid broader economic uncertainty. That alone is notable. What's more specific and more useful for understanding how travel is changing is where that spending is actually going.

Experiences over things — and the data is explicit about the trade-off

The study doesn't just find that people are spending more on travel in general — it identifies a specific reallocation happening within travel budgets. According to the report, when travelers face higher costs, they are more likely to cut back on shopping and material goods than on activities and experiences. That's a meaningfully different finding than "people are spending more overall" — it's evidence of a genuine prioritization shift, not just a general increase in disposable travel income.

This shift is not evenly distributed globally. Asia Pacific travelers reportedly show around 50% higher intent to increase travel spending compared to travelers in Europe and the US, with the region called out specifically as the leading driver of experience-led travel. For a company building travel products aimed at Indian and APAC-region travelers, this isn't background noise — it's a description of exactly the market segment worth building for.

Multi-destination trips are becoming the norm, not the exception

A second finding from the same study reshapes what a "good itinerary" should even look like. Roughly two-thirds of respondents said they plan to visit multiple destinations per trip, a clear move away from single-city itineraries — with major cities increasingly treated as gateways rather than final destinations, opening up broader exploration within the same trip.

This has a direct implication for itinerary tools: a static, single-city recommendation list is increasingly out of step with how people actually want to travel. Planning tools built around "here are the top 10 things to do in one city" are answering a narrower question than the one most travelers, especially younger ones, are actually asking — which is closer to "help me build a coherent multi-stop trip," a meaningfully harder planning problem.

What "authentic" actually means to travelers, in their own words

Rather than relying on a vague sense that younger travelers want "authenticity," the study breaks down specifically what drives interest in lesser-known destinations: authentic local experiences, cited by 42% of respondents, the chance to discover hidden gems (39%), and affordability (37%) as the top reasons for choosing off-the-beaten-path spots over more obvious tourist hotspots.

This tracks with a broader pattern in the data around specific destinations. Japan remains one of the most considered destinations globally, but interest is reportedly spreading beyond Tokyo into secondary cities like Yokohama, Hiroshima, and Nagoya — places offering more breathing room and cultural depth than the most obvious stop. The same pattern shows up well beyond Asia, with emerging interest noted in destinations like Cairns and Hobart in Australia, Tromsø in Europe, and Sharjah and Hurghada in the Middle East.

The pattern is consistent: travelers aren't rejecting popular destinations outright, they're extending beyond the single most obvious stop within them, looking for depth over a checklist.

AI's growing but specific role in this shift

The study also quantifies something relevant to any company building AI travel tools: reported AI usage in travel planning reaches roughly 91% of respondents, though the report is specific about what that usage actually looks like — largely functional support for research, translation, itinerary planning, and budget management, rather than AI making the core decisions. Alongside this, roughly 80% of travelers say social media actively influences the destinations or experiences they book.

Read together, this describes a two-stage process rather than a single tool doing everything: social content sparks initial interest in a destination or experience, and AI tools then get used for the practical, structural work of turning that interest into an actual, workable plan. That's a meaningfully different role for AI than "AI decides where you should go" — it's closer to "AI does the unglamorous logistics work once a traveler already has a direction in mind."

What this means for how trips should be planned

Put together, these findings describe a traveler who wants to spend more on the experience itself, is planning multi-destination trips rather than single-city visits, is drawn to lesser-known spots specifically for authenticity and depth rather than novelty alone, and uses AI as a practical planning tool rather than a full decision-maker.

That's a specific, demanding profile for any trip-planning product to serve well. It requires handling multi-stop logistics competently (not just single-destination recommendations), surfacing genuinely distinctive local options rather than the same generic "top 10" list every destination gets, and doing the practical work — pacing, availability, realistic sequencing — quickly enough to keep up with a traveler who's already emotionally committed to the trip and just needs the plan to catch up.

The takeaway for travelers, not just the industry

If you recognize yourself in this data — spending more on the trip itself, building multi-stop routes, chasing depth over a checklist — it's worth being deliberate about the planning tools you use rather than defaulting to whatever generates the fastest single-city list. The shift in how people want to travel is real and well-documented; the tools built to support it are still catching up.

Source: Klook Travel Pulse 2026 study, based on approximately 11,000 respondents across 20 markets including India.

What this looks like specifically for Indian travelers

The Klook study's methodology explicitly included India among its surveyed markets, which makes its findings more directly relevant to Zippy Trips' core audience than a purely Western-market study would be. This aligns closely with separate industry reporting on India's outbound tourism sector specifically — India's outbound tourism market has been valued in the tens of billions of dollars as of 2026, with continued double-digit annual growth projected, driven in large part by exactly the demographic the Klook study describes: a young, digitally fluent population with rising discretionary income and a stated preference for experiential rather than material spending.

This is worth connecting to a separate, India-specific trend covered in "Solo, Slow, and Self-Planned" — the rise of independent, self-planned travel among Indian travelers isn't happening in isolation from the broader experience-economy shift. It's arguably a natural extension of it: a traveler who wants deeper, more customized experiences over a standardized checklist is also more likely to want a self-planned, flexible trip over a fixed group package, since a rigid package itinerary is structurally at odds with the kind of exploratory, multi-destination, hidden-gem-seeking travel this data describes.

A necessary counterpoint: what this data doesn't tell us

It's worth being honest about the limitations of a single study, however large and well-constructed. The Klook study surveys Klook's own customer base and a broader panel primarily drawn from markets where Klook operates — a methodology that's genuinely useful for capturing broad directional trends but that skews, by definition, toward travelers who are already engaged with digital travel platforms in the first place. It likely underrepresents travelers who plan primarily through traditional agents, or who don't engage heavily with the kind of digital experience-booking platforms the study's sponsor operates.

It's also worth being cautious about over-interpreting self-reported spending intentions as guaranteed future behavior — a survey capturing what travelers say they plan to do in the coming year is a meaningfully different data point than confirmed, realized spending after the fact. The direction of the trend is well-supported across multiple years of the same study and consistent with independent industry reporting, but the specific percentages should be read as directional evidence rather than precise predictions.

Why this data point matters beyond a single blog post

This isn't included here purely as an interesting statistic — it's a genuine input into how travel products should be built for this specific traveler. A traveler who is, per this data, spending more on experiences, visiting multiple destinations per trip, and using AI as a functional planning tool rather than a full decision-maker needs a fundamentally different kind of itinerary tool than the one built for a traveler checking off a single city's top attractions on a fixed, agent-provided list.

This is a meaningful part of why Zippy Trips' own pretrip planning capabilities (detailed in "Everything You Can Do on Zippy Trips Before You Even Land") are built around multi-destination logic and locally distinctive, preference-matched recommendations rather than a generic single-city "top things to do" format — the traveler this data describes has already moved past that format, and the tools built to serve them need to move with them.

What travel companies get wrong when reading this data

A common misstep when companies encounter data like this is to interpret "travelers want experiences" as purely a merchandising signal — sell more activities, upsell more add-ons — without addressing the more fundamental planning challenge this data actually points to. A traveler who wants a multi-destination, experience-rich, authenticity-seeking trip needs a planning process capable of handling that complexity coherently, not just a longer menu of bookable activities layered on top of the same single-city, checklist-style itinerary structure. Selling more experiences without fixing how those experiences get woven into a coherent, well-paced multi-stop plan addresses the demand-side signal in this data while missing the actual planning bottleneck sitting underneath it.

A brief look at what "AI as functional tool" actually implies for product design

The study's specific framing — AI used functionally for research, translation, itinerary planning, and budget management, rather than as the primary decision-maker for where to travel — has a direct implication worth spelling out. It suggests travelers are not looking for an AI tool to replace their own judgment about where they want to go or what kind of trip they want; they're looking for a tool to competently execute the unglamorous logistics once that judgment has already been formed elsewhere, often through social content or personal recommendation. Building an AI travel product around "tell us where you want to go and what you're drawn to, and we'll handle the structural, logistical work of turning that into a real, workable plan" is a closer match to this data than building a product that tries to be the primary source of destination inspiration itself. That's a meaningful, checkable distinction, and it shapes how a product like Zippy Trips prioritizes execution and logistics quality over trying to compete as a discovery or inspiration platform in its own right.

Closing thought

Data like this is most useful not as a static snapshot but as an ongoing check against a product's assumptions. As Klook and similar organizations continue running this kind of study year over year, revisiting these numbers against how Zippy Trips' own user base actually behaves is a natural, worthwhile discipline — one this blog intends to keep returning to as fresher data becomes available.
It's a more honest way to build a product roadmap than relying on assumptions that were never actually tested against real traveler behavior in the first place.

The travelers described in this data are, in effect, telling the industry exactly what they want. The companies that listen carefully — and build for the specific, checkable behaviors described here rather than a generic sense of "people like experiences now" — are the ones likely to earn their trust over the next few years of this shift playing out.
That's the standard worth holding this piece, and every product decision it informs, to going forward.
Data ages; the discipline of checking it regularly against real behavior shouldn't.
That's the closing thought worth carrying forward.
The shift is real, well-documented, and worth building around deliberately rather than treating as background noise.

Key takeaways