Top Travel Trends of 2024

Wedding costs have been rising faster than inflation, reaching an average of nearly $30,000, in 2019 in the US.

This has been driven by several factors: people are getting married older, meaning they're often in a better financial position by the time they marry, making it easier to splurge. And the rise of living together before marriage means that marriage is a less significant milestone, so some couples feel the need to make the party a bigger deal to compensate. Meanwhile, rising wedding costs are a somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy; if it only happens once, no one wants theirs to be noticeably cheap.

But this trend is leading to a reaction, accelerated by the pandemic: elopement is getting more popular, and it's creating a mini-industry in elopement packages, which simplify and standardize the process to make it even easier. Elopement has always been an option, but its recent growth is not just because of the lower price.

For one, there are typically far more people in the orbit of a 30-year-old compared to a 20-year-old. This means more seats to pay for and more debate over who does and doesn’t make the invitation list. Plus, travel and destinations are an even more important part of the wedding cost equation after Covid, when many relationships got spread around the country, and people might not even be sure where all their friends are living; a guest list that was within a short travel distance in 2019 can involve international travel for some guests in 2021. Elopement neatly solves both sides of this problem by reducing the guest list to the bare minimum.

As well, the rising average age of marriage not only pushes traditional wedding costs up, but it also has a direct effect on the demand for elopement. Older couples are less likely to conform to their parents’ wedding arrangement wishes over their own. And divorces mean that there are many second weddings, which are often lesser investments than the first.

And with significantly decreased spend on the wedding itself, destination elopements are becoming much more common. This also means more impressive wedding photos, which is a bigger part of elopements’ appeal in the age of social media.

The lodging market and the housing market are typically quite far apart—hotels operate on the assumption of single night stays, whereas housing typically assumes that residents will live somewhere indefinitely by default. In between these two markets is the extended-stay market: longer-term than a typical hotel, but not a permanent residence. Extended stay hotels appeal to people who are in the middle of a move, relocating temporarily because of a disaster, or are working on a short-term job contract.

Furnished Finder aims to be the Airbnb of the healthcare industry, matching landlords with travel nurses for multi-month stays. For landlords, it’s a profitable arrangement: short-term leases tend to have higher monthly rent, but they often select for difficult tenants. Nurses, however, are unusually good tenants; since the term of the lease lines up with the length of their contract, they’re unlikely to miss rent payments.

Since Furnished Finder is in the middle of a two-sided marketplace, it needs both sides’ trust. The site uses live statistics as social proof, showing off a screenshot of their Google Analytics page to highlight the site’s size to landlords, and offering city-level data showing the demand for nurses to highlight the value of the overall market.

Furnished Finder strategically shows that all their tenants are screened through a verification service called Keycheck. Behind the scenes, Keycheck is actually owned by Furnish Finder itself. Verification tools like this help establish Furnished Finder as a legitimate service, both in the eyes of landlords and tenants.

While Furnished Finder competes with non-verticalized home-sharing services, like Airbnb and Craigslist, it also competes with Facebook groups. For travel nurses, moving to a new location naturally means not necessarily knowing anyone there, so a way to find friends while at the same time finding housing, is ideal. This is particularly the case with nurses, whose frequent night shifts preclude them from typical social activities. There are many housing-focused travel nursing Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members, many focused on specific locations spread out across the globe. Furnished Finder itself uses its Facebook group, one of the largest of its kind, as an important part of its customer acquisition strategy.

The pandemic has massively disrupted healthcare, leading to worker shortages in some places (due to both high demand and infected healthcare workers) and surpluses elsewhere as elective procedures are delayed. Some of this exacerbates trends that predate the pandemic: aging and migration already meant that some less dense areas relied on travel nurses from younger and more populous locations. As a result, healthcare staffing has seen high demand during the pandemic, with other companies like ShiftKey on the rise. And the same places that have a persistent shortage of workers may have a persistent surplus of housing, making a home-rental model even more effective. Fixing a worker shortage doesn’t just mean matching people to jobs—it means matching workers to housing.

Interest in bikepacking is surging, fueled not only by a growing appetite for adventure travel, but also by state governments who see it as a boon for the small towns that cyclists pass through along the way.

The sport — a cross between cycle touring and mountain biking — tends to take riders through rural areas where tourism dollars are otherwise scarce, particularly outside of snowmobiling season. Cyclists go slower than snowmobilers and therefore often spend more time and money in towns, giving legislators an incentive to maintain and expand these trail networks for year-round access.

As they do so, they help boost the growing bikepacking industry, which includes not just specialty bike shops, but also gear manufacturers, tour companies, content creators, rental services, and trail guide apps like Alltrails. The market for bikepacking bags in particular on marketplaces like Amazon has grown significantly in recent years as cyclists seek lighter, more technical gear to store their stuff.

Before the advent of online photos, part of the ritual of a vacation was showing off photos back home. When photo production and consumption turned digital, it had an effect on vacations: it meant that the bragging rights from an impressive vacation accrued live on Instagram rather than after the fact and in person. This meant that a trip to somewhere exotic enough to have poor or nonexistent Internet access was less attractive. In recent years, cellular Internet access and solar-powered chargers have gotten more affordable and ubiquitous, helping to drive rugged and off-road vacations back into vogue.

Overlanding is the practice of traveling long distances off-road, often in specially-outfitted vehicles. But despite being a hobby of outdoor adventure, it’s very much a gear-centric hobby: more than half of the top ten posts on the overlanding subreddit (178,000+ members) are photos of heavily-outfitted vehicles parked in parking lots. Like vertical GPU mounts (another rising product we’ve covered), part of the point of the equipment is to show off fancy setups, not necessarily to perform. Even when comparing the ratio of YouTube and TikTok views to Google searches for “hiking”, “camping”, and “overlanding”, it’s clear that overlanding outranks its peers in social media shareworthiness.

This trend has created a new market of products for people who intend to travel off-road for days at a time: compact solar panel arrays, ultra-long-lasting coolers, and specialized roof racks. Traction boards, which used to get cars out of muddy ruts, are a very early but growing category on Amazon.

Overlanding is especially appealing to people who have aged out of traditional camping, but still enjoy the outdoors. These older enthusiasts may not be able to hike and camp for days at a time, but they have the disposable income for elaborate off-road setups.