Arival

Trendspotting may drive media headlines and (some) conference agendas, but operators need to focus on something more important: what travelers are actually buying. The travel industry loves a buzzword. Slow travel. Regenerative tourism. Digital detox. Set-jetting. Every year brings a few new trends that promise to reshape travel. But when we asked more than 560 multi-day tour operators what travelers actually want, the answers were surprisingly straightforward.

Travelers are no longer starting their trips on a search results page. They are starting them in a conversation. They ask a chatbot where to go, what to do and what is worth booking, and they arrive at your listing already half-decided. That single shift in behavior is the throughline of AI That Works, the Spring 2026 Travel Experience Trend Tracker produced by GetYourGuide and built on the findings of Arival’s Global Operator Landscape (4th Edition) study.

Dynamic pricing has transformed airlines, hotels, ridesharing and countless other industries. Travel experiences have largely been the exception. Most tour, activity and attraction operators still rely on fixed pricing, charging the same price regardless of demand, seasonality or booking conditions. But that is changing.

Ask a room full of tour operators how they feel about the year ahead and you tend to get the same answer: a shrug, followed by some version of “who knows.” Global instability, inflation, safety questions, shifting trade policy, airline disruptions, political uncertainty, overtourism backlash, booking behavior that swings month to month. The forces shaping demand right now sit mostly outside any single operator’s control. That uncertainty pushes a lot of owners into a familiar trap.

Arival’s The State of Multi-Day Tours (2nd Ed.) found that third-party resellers account for 29% of all bookings in the multi-day sector — bigger than online travel agencies (OTAs) at 19%, and bigger than direct website bookings at 20%. Business-to-business (B2B) distribution is the single largest sales channel available to multi-day operators, and for many, it was the financial lifeline that kept their business operating during the pandemic.

When most people picture adventure travel, they picture something physical. Hiking or climbing a mountain. Careening over rapids. Screaming down a zipline (in my case, usually literally). The kind of experience that gets the heart pumping, the adrenaline flowing, and reminds you you’re alive.

There are many types of tours – and many types of travelers. But what do travelers actually want from a tour in 2026? What is driving traveler choice? And how should operators be designing and positioning their products? Based on Arival’s latest consumer research across U.S. and European travelers, the answer is surprisingly clear. While the market is fragmented, traveler expectations around tours are not.

Two out of every three U.S. consumers now watch travel videos on YouTube as part of their trip-planning process. The platform’s travel category is exploding, with 3.7 million travel channels and 593 billion views in the first half of 2025 alone (source). That is not a niche audience. It is a massive, intent-rich pool of potential customers watching destination guides, reading reviews and searching for experiences exactly like the ones you sell.

Dynamic pricing is suddenly the hot topic of tours, activities and attractions. However, when I speak with operators, I often hear some version of the same sentence: “We already do dynamic pricing.” And in most cases, they don’t. That’s not criticism. Most operators are already doing something more advanced than flat pricing, and that’s a good thing. But much of what gets called “dynamic pricing” is really rules-based pricing, last-minute discounting, or competitor matching.

If you are concerned – and confused – about the state of the traveler in 2026, you’re not alone. There are a lot of signals, and they’re increasingly contradictory. In the U.S., economic indicators are sending conflicting messages: employment remains strong, inflation is rising, and consumer sentiment is weak. And yet travel demand, particularly among higher-income travelers, continues to hold. As Delta’s CEO recently noted, affluent travelers appear largely insulated from geopolitical shocks.