With TikTok tips to turn two days of annual leave into a five-day holiday and workers sneaking in meetings on the road, travellers are making their trips count – by making them last.

In August 2024, the director of a viral tourism advert for Oslo told the BBC he’d always prefer sitting at someone’s kitchen table drinking milk to pit-stopping at tourist traps. This was, after all, the summer that tourism came back, and arguably the summer that tourism went too far, with bad traveller behaviour and troubling overtourism hitting many popular destinations. While the urge to get away doesn’t seem to be dwindling, industry experts say travellers in 2025 are plotting longer stays and finding ways to stretch their time away from home and work to be as long as possible and further immerse themselves in a single destination.

According to Skift Research’s 2025 Travel Outlook report, travel companies are anticipating a 24% rise in the number of trips people are planning for the year ahead compared to 2024. Globally, long leisure trips stand out as the most popular type of travel ahead of weekend getaways and road trips, with Skift’s report calling 2025 “the year of long getaways”. This is particularly true in China, India and Germany. In the US, one quarter of respondents said they expect to take a long international or cross-continental vacation this year, though slightly more expect to take shorter trips.

“Travellers are over the frenzy of taking photos in wildly packed tourist sites or iconic hotels just to say they’ve been there,” explained Julia Carter, founder of luxury travel company Craft Travel. “Instead, they now increasingly recognise that when it comes to travel, a destination only really comes alive when you slow things down.”

That slowdown is stretching to an average trip duration close to two weeks for luxury travellers, according to the Luxury Travel Report by Zicasso, another high end travel-planning company. Founder and CEO Brian Tan told the BBC, “[We’ve] noted a continued increase in average length of travel to 13.5 days, as well as more travellers preferring a single-destination personalised journey, where they can explore a culture more deeply, instead of multi-country trips.” The trip duration increase has been a slow one (it’s only up from 13.4 days average in 2024), but the report adds that 76.2% of respondents prefer single-country trips for 2025, which Zicasso has qualified as a “trend toward depth over breadth in travel experiences”.