The Travel Trends of 2022

‘This year I am going to be in the Netherlands as little as possible,’ I said at the end of last year. And that is still a goal for myself. Of course, we are still dealing with it-who-must-not-be-named, but secretly we can already travel quite a bit. But what will be the biggest trend in travel? Booking.com I figured it out and I got to put it to the test with the best test subject there is: my best friend. The booking site conducted research among over 24,000 people (from 31 countries) and they came up with seven trends . This year, we are really leaving work completely behind during vacations (which I like), we want to give back more to local communities during our travels, and we embrace the unpredictable. I can relate to all of this, but one trend in particular fits perfectly into my alley.

2022 will be fully the year of ‘Just Say Yes’. Just do it. Carpe diem, as they say. Live in the now. Don’t overthink everything. Don’t immediately think: but what if… NO. Do it. My best friend was the perfect test subject for this because he is not great at making decisions and planning a vacation with him is really a nightmare. I can send him a hundred Booking.com-links with accommodations and then he has to sleep on it for every single one. Yep: quite exhausting. For me, but also for him, it seemed. That’s why I decided to surprise him.

And it became… Iceland. A country I have wanted to go to for a very long time and he did too; we had talked about it often enough. But actually planning it never happened, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I booked everything: the flight, the accommodations, and I planned the activities for each day. What we were going to see, what the highlights were; you name it. Now we are fortunately very much on the same page when it comes to what we like, so it was genuinely a huge success.

Such a big success that we are definitely going to do it again this year. I sometimes fall back into old patterns and instead of doing something out of my comfort zone (like booking a trip to Iceland), I quickly think: let’s not make it too difficult (and we end up in Barcelona for the tenth time; which is nice too). Maybe I should adjust my motto a bit: this year I am going to make as many beautiful, surprising, and special trips as possible without thinking too much about it.

Just. Say. Yes. I really like this trend.