By Rishika Sharma, on January 5, 2023

No Normal: the hottest tips, trends and insights for travel in 2023

When you’re looking for vacation inspiration, what do you do? Do you Google the best places to visit? Scroll through Instagram or Pinterest for ideas? Or do you ask friends and family for their recommendations? Whatever your method, you can now you can add one more resource to your list: our annual 2023 Travel Trends Report, which has some of the best insights, tips and ideas for travel next year.

Every year, we spend months mining through billions of data points to look at when, where, and how people are searching for trips and booking them. We also team up with third-party researchers to get insights into the traveler mindset beyond just what we’re seeing at Expedia to build a complete picture of what’s going to be hot for the upcoming year. The end result is the annual Travel Trends Report, which we’ve been publishing for five years now. But this year, for the first time, we teamed up with our sister brands Vrbo and Hotels.com to add even more science into identifying what’s motivating vacations in 2023.

What we’ve discovered is that while 2022 was the year of going big, ticking off bucket lists, and taking the greatest of all trips, 2023 is looking to be a bit more relaxed and even more of a break from the normal (so much so that we’ve dubbed it the Year of No Normal). We’re seeing travelers who want to trade ultra-luxe resorts for simpler two- and three-star hotels so they can invest more time and money in discovering culture capitals across the globe and set-jetting to places that have caught their imagination via the silver screen. We’re also seeing a growing appetite for exploring more of America as well an interest in quirky wellness activities such as forest bathing, fruit harvesting, and laughter therapy.

To find out which destinations are trending for 2023, why you’ve got to make sure your next vacation rental has its own pizza oven, and why Jamaica will solve all your problems, check out the full episode now.

And if you are looking to book, don’t miss this season’s episode on travel hacks. It’s your insider’s guide to the best credit cards for travelers, and how to double, triple, and even quadruple dip on earning membership points.


Want to learn more?

Listen to the podcast now, check out the complete transcript below, or catch the full conversation on Spotify or Apple.

See the 2024 Travel Trends