Eight travel trends to know in 2025, including JOMO and Awayborhoods.
Every January, I start planning trips for the new year. I go all out: Pinterest mood boards, magazine collages, aesthetic travel-themed desktop backgrounds. I let myself daydream, flip through coffee table books, and visualize what a new year of travel will look like.
As a travel editor, I often view the future of travel through trends. My December inbox is half-filled with trend reports and spreadsheets, so predictions for the hottest destinations, ‘it’ list-worthy restaurants, and voguish trip ideas tend to live rent-free in my mind.
Here are eight travel trends we think Passport To Eden readers will love. You might see a few of these trends populating your social media feeds this year!
JOMO
2025 is the year of soft travel, with rest days done your way at your pace. Urgency is out: no more rushing from attraction to attraction. So take a deep breath. Unknot all fears tangled up in FOMO, and let them slip away. According to ‘Unpack 25, Expedia Group’s annual travel trend report, “It’s time to embrace JOMO, the joy of missing out.”
JOMO is unwinding without the pressure to be here and there. Picture a quiet, plan-free weekend at a Postcard Cabin or a cozy night at a vacation rental equipped with everything you need to recharge (whether that’s a plunge pool or a writer’s desk).
This year, ask yourself: what makes me feel well-rested?
Hurkle-Durkling
Rest is best, and thanks to Kira Kosarin’s viral TikTok soundbite, hurkle-durkling (the act of nesting in bed after your typical wakeup time) is having its moment in travel. This 19th-century Scots word is everything we love about stress-free days off: lazing, lounging, lingering.
Hilton’s Annual Trend Report mentions that 20% of travelers enjoy hurkle-durkling. I’m a wake-up-before-sun-up (must have coffee by 6 am) sort of traveler, but I like to leave room for one morning of hurkle-durkling each trip (usually, the last day of a hotel stay. If 11:30 am is the checkout time, you’ll find me hurkling my last durkle at 10:00 am). With no long commutes, morning meetings, stand-up, or Slack messages to attend to, hurkle-durkling gives you permission to hit snooze (or ditch your alarm) and enjoy the snug feeling of lying in bed while swaddled in fluffy down comforters.
OOO
Welcome to the year of firm paid time off (PTO) boundaries, where a day off is a day off. In 2025, more travelers will be shrugging off the digital nomad lifestyle. This year, a vacation is a space to recharge unplugged. According to a recent Contiki research survey, “70% of travellers disconnect from work completely when they’re on holiday.”
Our takeaway? Maximize your out of office (OOO) time by keeping your laptop days (at least) one closed briefcase away from your hotel stays. Give yourself the space to be more present while traveling.
Solo Trip
Another travel trend multiple write-ups – Contiki’s and AmEx’s to name two – are highlighting? Solo trips. Imagine freeing, empowering, and emboldening itineraries where you can do what you want when you want.
Let a good book accompany your me time (Hilton’s Annual Trends report shares that “64% of solo travelers consider a good book their favorite travel partner“). And if you need a little pre-vacay confidence boost, I recommend joining an uplifting, women-supporting-women Facebook group like Girls Love Travel (this group helped me pluck up the courage to book my first solo trip)!
Set-Jetting
Movies have long influenced how and where we travel. Turquoise-watered Thai paradise Ko Phi Le surged with backpackers after the release of The Beach in 2000. A decade later, Bali packed in Eat Pray Love devotees. The Lord Of The Rings series shifted the landscape of New Zealand’s tourism.
In 2023, Expedia respotted set-jetting (traveling to filming locations) as an emerging travel behavior. Set-jetting trended again in 2024 and again in 2025. This year, One Piece will lead fans to South Africa. Bridgerton tours are springing into London. And I’m personally hoping Atlanta, Georgia, becomes one of the most popular set-jetting destinations in the world (opinion: it deserves to be. fact: the city, nicknamed Y’allywood, has backdropped over 300 shows and films).
Art Venture
Traveling to see art that envelops is on the rise too. According to Skyscanner’s US Travel Trends report, 52% of Gen-Z travelers (in the US) “are planning an immersive art experience” in 2025.
Here’s why. Immersive art is unpretentious, unbound by white cubes and heavy frames. Art can be engaging and carefree; labyrinthine adult playgrounds like Meow Wolf in Santa Fe and The City Museum in St. Louis remind us of that.
Small Town Charm
This year’s Priceline travel projection predicts that more travelers will embrace small towns. Small-town trips will be viewed as cozy, nostalgic escapes à la Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls.
As a Gilmore Girls fan, I tend to romanticize small towns (especially when a community is blissfully unaware it’s hospitality-forward: local recs are shared as stories, food is home-cooked, and families run charming bed-and-breakfasts). Here are a few cottagecore favorites.
Awayborhoods
In 2025, young travelers are choosing casual neighborhood activities over big-ticket attractions. Picture a tour of Ybor City, with its clucking roosters, crisp Cuban sandwiches, and casitas, instead of a day at Busch Gardens Tampa Bay.
Priceline refers to this trend as Awayborhoods. To us, Awayborhoods seems part of a larger 2025 realization: travel can have the casualness and comfort of evenings at home, even when you’re wrapt in a new destination, surrounded by new experiences.
What travel trend are you most looking forward to in 2025? Let me know in the comments below. As always, I love hearing from you!
