Always orbiting: How consumers plan travel experiences now

The travel journey used to run in a straight line: decide, research, book. Recent McKinsey research on travel trends reveals a new approach to planning, as consumers drift between dream trips, continually rethink bookings, and revise their itineraries right up to departure. On this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey Editorial Director Roberta Fusaro speaks with McKinsey Partners Alex Gersovitz and Margaux Constantin about how social media and TV shows are increasingly sparking trip ideas, why machine readability is the new SEO, and how companies can keep travelers excited in the period between booking and arrival.

The McKinsey Podcast is cohosted by Lucia Rahilly and Roberta Fusaro.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Easier to research, harder to choose

Roberta Fusaro: You’ve done a deep dive into how people plan and book travel. What surprised you most about how different that process looks today?

Margaux Constantin: Travel used to start with the intention to travel. That’s not the case anymore, because intent is always present. Travel has become such a big part of people’s lives. Survey after survey, we see that people want to travel more, younger generations included. It’s becoming a higher share of disposable income. That’s an absolute secular trend, and as a result, intent is always on. Rather than the process of “I want to book something” to “I do research” to “I make a decision,” we see that people are always orbiting or exploring multiple destinations and travel inspirations simultaneously.

We also found that over 60 percent of travelers say it’s easier than ever to research and find good options, yet they’re spending more time researching. Information is easier to find, but they spend more time on it, which is quite a paradox. That’s partly because people enjoy it: 80 percent of travelers enjoy researching as part of the experience itself. You want to enjoy the trip before you go just as much as when you’re there. We also found that the burden to “choose well” gives about 50 percent of travelers anxiety.

Alex Gersovitz: I was surprised by that too. We asked travelers which they would prefer: a somewhat limitless list of 500 options for their trip, a curated set of ten options, or a single recommendation. I was surprised that about 60 percent picked the middle option. Whatever LLM [large language model] or AI-based tool they’re using, they’re saying, “I don’t want the limitless list of 500. I also don’t want you to tell me what to do. I want ten ideas tailored to me that I can sift through.”

So much of AI has been about efficiency and doing things as quickly as possible. But travel will always have an emotional, exploratory element that I think is really important, and you can see it as a trend throughout the work.

Inspired by social media, swayed by authenticity

Roberta Fusaro: I was reading about a trend called “set-jetting” instead of jet-setting, referring to people inspired by their favorite TV shows to visit a location. I’m curious about the role of social media in this. How has it changed the way people think about trips and where a trip actually begins?

Margaux Constantin: In the past, inspiration followed intent. You wanted to go on a trip, and then you searched for it. Now, ideas precede intent. This makes this difficult for travel companies. How do you capture a customer who hasn’t even decided they want to do anything yet?

Social media is the number one spark. Sixty percent of travelers cite it as one of their top sources, and 70 percent say it made them consider a destination they otherwise wouldn’t have thought of. The more interesting part is that this is often entertainment for consumers; exploring travel ideas isn’t “work.” When they switch gears to researching and making comparisons, they go to AI and OTAs [online travel agencies]. It’s not just social media, but TV and movies too, none of which are channels that travel players own. A quarter of the people we surveyed go to OTAs or supplier sites for inspiration. The name of the game is learning how to be in the right place on the entertainment journey, which comes well before intention.

Alex Gersovitz: Regarding set-jetting, about 25 percent of people listed seeing a destination on TV or in a movie as a top three source of inspiration. As Margaux said, social media is number one. But having a quarter of all people who cited TV or movies as a top three source is pretty powerful.

Building excitement, a brand, and content around your destination are tools that clearly inspire people to go to a specific place. If you asked me to forecast the future, I’d say this will become more of a trend. You’ve already seen it in content produced over the past couple of years, featuring destinations that later became travel hot spots.

Roberta Fusaro: With so many sources of inspiration and information available, how are travelers deciding who and what to trust?

Alex Gersovitz: That’s the real question to solve as the travel industry adopts AI, not just as a source of inspiration but as a source of conversion and, ultimately, loyalty. Today, the number one trusted source for travel decisions is a family member.

Over time, as we’ve done this work, AI and LLM tools are increasingly trusted as sources of inspiration. People are slowly learning to use these tools and incorporate them into a stack of inspiration sources alongside traditional search, friends and family, and social media. But it will take time for travelers to trust an AI tool to book a trip. Many people are still hesitant there.

Margaux Constantin: There’s a premium for authenticity. People are worried about being cheated or lied to. Maybe LLMs are hallucinating, or brands are lying. Coming to your guests in an authentic way carries a huge premium in this environment of constant inspiration.

Staying in the traveler’s orbit

Roberta Fusaro: If I’m a hotel CEO, an airline executive, or a leader at a travel platform, how do I address travelers in this new milieu? What could travel leaders do differently to reach people at the right moments in their journey?

Alex Gersovitz: As Margaux said, people are orbiting around many trips and moving up and down that orbit. They can quickly go from “I’m about to book” to “Should I switch my destination?” They go two steps forward and then one step back. AI now lets them monitor and continually reassess whether they made the optimal decision. I often feel this way myself. I’ll book a vacation or make a major emotional purchase, and then I’ll think, “Was that the right choice?”

With AI, the research shows a much higher rate of people saying, “I’ve booked it, and I’m going, but now I want to reassess and rebook,” or “I found a lower rate or a different way to get there.”

If I were a travel CEO today, I would think about building out the period from booking to arrival, whether that’s on the plane, at the property, or at the destination. Build excitement or a story, and help travelers understand what their experience might look and feel like once they arrive. Lean into emotions because AI tools have empowered people to continually revisit their choices, and they are taking the opportunity to change. If you want to keep the bookings you have, building that emotion, story, and feeling will become increasingly important.

Margaux Constantin: We find that almost 80 percent of travelers are still researching their trips after booking. Not all of that is rebooking and price control, although a big chunk is. A big part is thinking, “Now that I am clear on the core of my trip, and I have my flight and hotel, which restaurants and activities do I want to incorporate?” There’s a unique moment to capitalize on what you now own and engage with the traveler on that exploration, regardless of whether you own some of those potential restaurants. It helps you lock in that final conversion.

We’re not saying you need to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to be on every touchpoint of every channel, or to start your own movies and TV shows. You can’t. You have to accept that you won’t be everywhere. However, do you know where you appear and how you show up there? Machine readability is an important thing to keep in mind. Get into the details and be hyper-factual about what you offer. If you’re a hotel provider, that means providing details about the property, specifics for every room, and listing each offering, because LLMs pull from facts.

Roberta Fusaro: AI has become both a source of feedback and a tool for generating it. How do CEOs need to manage AI differently?

Margaux Constantin: It’s still in its early stages for many operators. They’ve all learned the hard way how to maximize SEO, but GEO [generative engine optimization] is still at an early stage. You need to stay on top of things. You have to know how you show up in these engines, against which prompts and keywords, and how your competitors appear. Ask yourself if you have a machine to keep learning about this. You need to be open-minded about being on a learning journey.

An entertaining thing we did was use the same prompt in three LLMs and the AI tools of two OTAs. The prompt was something like, “I want to travel on Labor Day with my family. I want a room with a river view that can accommodate us. Give me five recommendations.” Not a single hotel came up five times. At most, the best ones came up twice. It was a complete mix and match across the five, which clearly shows that these LLMs pull different attributes from different places. Are you monitoring that, checking sources, and learning? These tools keep evolving. Do you keep learning with them?

Roberta Fusaro: Are any companies getting it right?

Margaux Constantin: An interesting example is what Four Seasons has done with the TV show The White Lotus. In every luxury brand survey you can get your hands on, brand awareness and consideration for the Four Seasons have gone through the roof. There’s something about how, even in the luxury segment, TV has played to awareness and consideration.

Alex Gersovitz: As a big fan of The White Lotus, I’d point out that the show never once mentions the Four Seasons by name. To me, that’s evidence of people googling the location and saying, “Where is this place? I want to go there.” Travel operators can extrapolate from that and build on that theme.

Margaux Constantin: The interesting part is whether you’re experimenting enough without putting in millions of dollars. I think creative content generation is a completely underrated role in hospitality. Are you being hypercreative in how you show up in different places, running experiments, and tracking their impact?

Alex Gersovitz: An emerging pain point in our research that no one has made progress on yet is travelers having to start over after research. If you’re moving up and down this orbit, it’s frustrating as a traveler to think, “I built so much context with the tool I was using to research trips. I went away for a few weeks, and now that I’m back, I’m on the operator’s platform instead of my third-party LLM tool, or in an OTA’s tool instead of the one I was using.” You have to manually refresh its context.

If people are going to orbit around trips for a long time, solving the context problem will become both increasingly important and a big challenge as AI use grows. That means keeping track of which trips they were considering, which decisions they’ve already made, and why they made them.

Margaux Constantin: Today it’s OK, but five years from now, you won’t imagine any traveler having the patience to enter every person’s passport details and date of birth at every step of the journey. At some point, travelers will expect not to do that anymore.

How can AI earn travelers’ trust?

Roberta Fusaro: The research also points to travelers’ hesitancy to use AI as an agent to book on their behalf. What will need to change for AI to be used more often?

Margaux Constantin: Interestingly, a lot of travelers used AI to research, compare options, and get smarter, but less than 20 percent were using it to book trips. However, most people were open to doing so going forward. But more important, they wanted some sort of recourse and a human being on the other side. There was a sense of, “If I book with AI, maybe I can’t cancel or change. What if I have a problem? Who do I call?”

Roberta Fusaro: I wonder, if I give it all over to AI, where’s the enjoyment for me? How will I revisit that experience in Istanbul or that dinner reservation?

Alex Gersovitz: I couldn’t agree more. I knew sometime this past summer I’d have a week between projects that I could take off. I started a chat in one of the tools I use in my personal life and prompted, “Here’s roughly when I’ll have about a week of vacation. Here’s what I think I want. Help me come up with options.” It gave me a curated list. I started focusing on Iceland, and the trip was originally for June. It would’ve been beautiful.

Then one thing led to another, and the trip was delayed until mid-September. I still had that same chat, so I said, “Iceland’s probably not going to work anymore. The parameters are still true. I want a walkable destination, something I haven’t seen before, and great food,” among a couple of other parameters. “Help me figure out another destination.” It curated a new list, and I ended up going to the Big Island of Hawaii. It met all my criteria. It was interesting to scroll back through that chat, which lasted maybe five or six months.

It built me an itinerary while I was there and suggested things to check out during my trip. I reported back to it, treating it like a friend and offering feedback like, “That was a great recommendation.” That way, it learns a little more about me. To me, that was one of those orbits we’ve talked about. I was sure I was going to Iceland, then I took a step back, and then I moved forward again. It was interesting to see that play out in my own life while we were doing this research.

Margaux Constantin: You’re asking the right question. We see people wanting to spend time indulging in the research. That trend is increasing year on year, and it’s part of the journey. It’s interesting, because you’re almost stuck between two types of tools. You have the Instagrams and TikToks of the world, which are hyper-visual and hyper-inspirational, and then you have LLM tools, which are highly text-based, very informative, and not very visual. I’m clearly a millennial, so I’m referencing Instagram, but there are many other inspiration platforms out there.

Roberta Fusaro: You mentioned being a millennial. Do the findings span generations? Were there any generational differences?

Margaux Constantin: We saw a very big difference among families who skew a bit more millennial, being much more worried about booking the wrong thing. I definitely fall into that hyper-researching category, asking myself, “Is it really the right room? How will this work with the kids and my husband?” That’s partly because it’s a bigger group, with more consensus and compromises, and partly because the data is much less machine-readable. Even today, it’s very difficult to know whether a room actually fits one child or two, or whether you need interconnecting rooms, and so on.

It varies a lot depending on the generation, the group, the type of vacation, and whether it’s business or leisure travel. There’s a lot of segmentation here, and the nuances are worth understanding.

Roberta Fusaro: After spending all this time studying how people plan vacations, have either of you changed the way you plan a trip?

Alex Gersovitz: I don’t know that I’ve changed. But what’s been heartening is learning that where I started is normal, and I really enjoy the planning process. It’s a big part of what I love about travel. We don’t go on as many vacations in our lifetimes as we wish we could. I think finding those moments of emotion and inspiration is common and really important, and I don’t think we’ll lose that in an AI world. So I’m leaning into that knowledge, I suppose.