Changing travel behavior Why the vacation off-season is disappearing

The low season has always been a good way to avoid crowds of tourists and expensive hotel and flight prices. But climate change and changes in travel behavior are softening the seasonal thinking in tourism.

In the past, people who wanted to avoid crowds of tourists, expensive flight and hotel prices and long queues at attractions simply booked in the low season - provided they didn't have school-age children. Bargain hunters were also happy to get their money's worth outside of school vacations and other official holidays.

But the pandemic has thrown conventional travel behavior overboard. In times of internet access virtually everywhere, remote working that eliminates the need to be in the office and the trend towards homeschooling, it seems as if people are constantly traveling.

Practically every day there are new headlines about efforts to combat overtourism, such as new hotel bans in Amsterdam, photo blockades in Japan and mass protests in the Canary Islands. According to the United Nations, global travel will return to pre-pandemic levels in 2024 - and could rise even further.

Is there still such a thing as an off-season?

"Travel is getting busier globally," says Olivier Ponti, Director at ForwardKeys, a company that analyzes travel data. According to calculations, there is no longer a low season for Thailand, for example, he tells the US television station CNN.

The climate change effect

A survey conducted by the European Travel Commission in 2023 found that European travelers cited the weather as the most important factor when deciding where to spend their vacation. Many people assumed that the low season is the time of year when the local weather is at its worst, CNN reports. But climate change is redefining what the "worst" weather might be.

Heatwaves in southern European countries such as Italy, Spain and Greece caused a tourism crisis last summer. And since the beginning of June 2024, at least five tourists have already died in Greece due to extreme heat.

In 2022, the hottest summer on the continent since records began, there were more than 62,000 heat-related deaths in Europe. Following the devastating headlines, ForwardKeys data showed an immediate increase in searches for summer flights to northern European destinations such as Denmark and Sweden.

But non-European destinations are also affected by climate change. Tour operator Intrepid Travel, for example, has had to cancel or postpone some of its most popular trips due to climate change. In Nepal, says Head of Communications Mikey Sadowski, there is a stronger monsoon season. "The snow is melting faster, the glaciers are melting faster, the water is flowing faster and routes that we could normally access in the past are no longer accessible. We need to shorten the travel season to avoid the monsoon season."