There’s a moment most seasoned travelers recognize. You’re sitting in a resort restaurant, surrounded by the right light and a menu designed for visitors, and the nagging feeling sets in that the city you flew twelve hours to reach is happening somewhere else, just out of reach beyond the perimeter fence. For a growing number of experienced travelers, that feeling is no longer tolerable.
Something fundamental has shifted in how people travel. People are trading revenge travel from the pandemic era for something more deliberate and intentional. The question isn’t simply where to go anymore. It’s how to actually be there.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
When traveling, roughly nine in ten Americans say they want to experience life as locals do, according to research from GetYourGuide and Wakefield Research. That’s a striking figure, and it’s not coming from first-time tourists with a bucket list. It reflects a broad, sustained preference change among people who have been around enough to know what they’re missing inside a resort bubble.
In 2024, more than half of all travel was focused on cultural heritage, and that share is expected to grow as more travelers seek deeper, more meaningful experiences connected to history, art, and traditions. The global travel experiences market was estimated to reach around 360 billion dollars in 2025. The money follows the meaning.
What “Local Experience” Actually Means in 2026
Travelers desire authentic experiences shaped by local chefs, artisans, and storytellers who bring a destination’s heritage to life. It’s no longer about observing culture from a distance – it’s about actively participating in it with the destination’s native citizens. This might mean taking a cooking class in someone’s home kitchen, joining a neighborhood market at dawn, or following a guide through streets that don’t appear in any glossy brochure.
Whether it’s a tortilla-making class in Mexico City or a fragrance workshop in Paris, the vast majority of younger travelers say they’re likely to seek out local workshops or activities specific to the destination they’re visiting. Nearly seven in ten believe that creating something with their hands is one of the most rewarding parts of travel, and more than four in five say learning a new skill while traveling creates a more memorable experience.
The Resort Fee Problem That Won’t Go Away
Part of the resort exodus is less romantic, it’s financial. The average U.S. resort fee in early 2023 was roughly $42 per night, amounting to about eleven percent of the room cost. In recent years the backlash has grown, with analyses suggesting Americans pay three to four billion dollars per year in hotel resort fees alone.
In late 2024, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission adopted a final “Junk Fees Rule” covering hotels, short-term rentals, and ticketing, effective May 2025, which prohibits hiding mandatory fees. The rule brought transparency, but not necessarily better value. Independent hotels, boutique inns, guesthouses, and smaller family-run properties are increasingly attracting travelers who want straightforward pricing, a trend especially noticeable in Europe, where many independent accommodations include Wi-Fi, breakfast, and local amenities within the room rate.
Boutique Hotels and the Rise of Sense of Place
Independent boutique hotels are not simply competing with but are often excelling against big international hotel brands. Boutique hotels traditionally have a good track record in offering unique accommodation that reflects the local culture and environment, something experience-led travelers strongly appreciate. There’s a reason you remember the family-run pensione in Naples more vividly than the international chain in the same city.
Research from Preferred Hotels highlights a backlash against lookalike “Insta-famous” hotels, with the vast majority of luxury travelers saying they can spot when a property is designed for mass appeal rather than true luxury. Preferred has described this creeping sameness as “beige-ification,” noting rising demand for original hotels with a strong sense of place. The uniformity of the mega-resort model, which was once a selling point, has quietly become a drawback.
Slow Travel Is Replacing the Resort Week
Travelers are increasingly moving away from rigid itineraries, oversized resorts, and performative luxury, instead prioritizing experiences that feel personal, restorative, and emotionally memorable. Slow travel, wellness escapes, private cultural access, and nature-led stays are no longer niche categories – they are reshaping the way people define luxury itself.
International trip lengths are seven percent higher in 2025 than pre-pandemic averages, according to Oxford Economics. These longer stays amplify demand for accommodation in culturally rich neighborhoods, guided cultural tours, and immersive experiences that make visitors feel part of the locale rather than outside spectators. The rise of slow travel sees travelers choosing longer stays in fewer destinations, which allows deeper cultural understanding and less travel stress.
Food as the Entry Point to Local Life
New experiences, local immersion, and cultural encounters remain the top reasons for booking adventure travel, and culinary and gastronomy activities are now the leading consumer trend in that category – an interest that has been rising steadily. People have always eaten on vacation. The difference now is that the meal itself has become the destination.
Food is particularly central to this shift, with the vast majority of travelers saying that trying local foods is their favorite part of traveling. While dining has always been central to travel, today’s travelers are accessing local flavors through smaller, more personal ways, with nearly nine in ten younger travelers saying it’s important to leave room in their itinerary to enjoy local snacks. A street taco from a vendor who’s been there for thirty years tells you more about a place than any resort restaurant ever could.
The Neighborhood Effect: Where You Stay Changes Everything
More than a third of travelers believe that the neighborhood they stay in has a direct impact on their vacation experience. Staying inside a resort compound essentially outsources that choice to an architect. Homestays and similar local accommodations are often situated in residential neighborhoods rather than tourist hotspots, and can include unique cultural experiences like cooking classes, guided walks, and local festivities.
Nearly three in four travelers say they prefer getting recommendations from locals when traveling, and almost three quarters of global travelers with children actively seek authentic, local experiences. This preference is hard to satisfy when the nearest local is a uniformed concierge working from a laminated card. The neighborhood stay, by contrast, makes those connections almost inevitable.
Younger Generations Are Driving the Rewrite
According to McKinsey survey data, roughly half of Gen Z travelers say they splurge on experiences compared to less than a third of baby boomers. Gen Z travelers also say they try to save money on flights, local transportation, shopping, and food before trimming their spending on experiences. The logic is clear: compress costs wherever the experience is fungible, spend freely where it isn’t.
The vast majority of Millennials and Gen Z travelers say they prioritize unique, authentic experiences over popular tourist attractions. And roughly four in five say they’re likely to do something completely out of the ordinary simply if it makes a good story. The resort, for all its polish, rarely makes a good story. The local fishing village at five in the morning does.
Overtourism Is Pushing Travelers Off the Beaten Path
Travelers themselves have not been happy with overcrowded cities and attractions, and are fighting overtourism in their own way. Expedia’s 2024 Trends in Travel Report found that roughly one in three travelers polled say they’ve booked a destination “dupe,” an under-the-radar alternative to a crowded hotspot. The major resorts cluster around the same famous beaches, the same iconic views, and the same bottlenecks that made those places famous in the first place.
Nearly two thirds of travelers say they are likely to visit an off-the-beaten-track destination on their next trip, according to Expedia’s “Unpack ’25” travel trend report surveying 25,000 respondents from 19 countries. The days of defaulting to the same old spots are fading, with a steady rise in people saying they want to explore somewhere genuinely new since mid-2022. Authenticity and scarcity now go together.
What the Travel Industry Is Doing About It
Experience tourism is becoming the norm as travelers want to connect with a place emotionally, and around nine in ten tourism service providers have seen higher demand for experiential travel, which typically offers more personalized and unique leisure experiences compared to conventional vacations. Even major resort brands have taken notice, rushing to attach local experiences, cultural programming, and chef collaborations to their offerings.
In 2026, travel is shifting from passive stays to purpose-driven experiences, with guests seeking emotional connection, meaning, and a sense of belonging over traditional luxury cues. Industry forecasts project the experiences market to reach nearly 373 billion dollars by 2034, and nearly nine in ten Europeans now seek more travel experiences than in recent years, emphasizing this sustained shift. The industry’s response is real, but it’s also playing catch-up to a change that travelers started long before any brand recognized it.
The Deeper Reason: Travel as Transformation, Not Escape
Travel is shifting from passive stays to purpose-driven experiences, with travelers choosing destinations and activities based on how they want to feel, investing more in curated, experiential components rather than room-only stays. The resort, at its core, is an architecture of escape – buffered from rain, noise, inconvenience, and local complexity. For experienced travelers, that buffer has started to feel like the whole point was missed.
The vast majority of global respondents say they like to leave room in their itinerary for unexpected local discoveries. That kind of openness is genuinely difficult to practice from behind a resort gate. After years of fast-paced itineraries and social media-inspired vacations, travelers are looking to slow down in 2026, focusing on more personal and immersive experiences – not traveling any less, just more intentionally.
The resort still has its place. But for travelers who’ve been at it long enough to know what they actually want, sitting poolside in a controlled environment increasingly feels like watching a destination through glass. The real thing is usually just a few streets away, and it doesn’t charge a daily resort fee to find it.