India, Nov. 25 -- Nearly every major travel trend begins as a vogue or a reaction, which is really just a popular response to an evolving reality among a subset of travellers or destinations that gradually gains wider traction. Some trends are fleeting (remember the brief obsession with sprinting through multiple countries), vanishing almost as fast as they appeared, while others hang back just long enough to evolve or quietly shuffle off the travel stage.

As the year draws to a close, change is in the air, and our editorial team has concluded their annual quest to professionally ponder which trend(s) will define travel in 2026. To find out, we sifted through dozens of reports and spoke with leading travel forecasters to peer into the cr...