A woman I know got back from Marrakech last month and barely mentioned the palaces or the souks. What she kept talking about was an afternoon she spent with a rug weaver, learning to tie the first few knots the way the woman had been taught as a kid. Nothing about that is new, really, people have always wanted this kind of thing when they travel. What’s changed is how easy it’s become to actually book it instead of just hoping it happens.
Where The Money Is Actually Going
Global travel spending is on pace to hit $2.1 trillion this year, which would be a record. But the more interesting part isn’t the total, it’s the direction things are moving. Tripadvisor pulled booking data from early 2026 and found that destinations outside its top 100 most-booked spots grew twice as fast as the famous ones. Guatemala, Albania, Honduras, places that used to barely register, are now showing booking growth that sometimes crosses 100% year over year.
There’s a whole industry built around this shift now. Arival and Phocuswright put the global tours-and-activities market at $271 billion for 2025 alone, growing faster than travel as a whole. And yet, this part surprised me, only about a third of these bookings happen online, compared to roughly two-thirds of travel bookings in general. There’s no single app that’s cornered this market yet. It’s too scattered, too local, run by too many small operators for one platform to just scoop it all up. Which is probably exactly why so many companies are racing to be the one that does.
The Big Platforms Noticed
Airbnb clearly saw where this was going. It brought experiences back in 2025 across 650 cities, and this time the listings actually felt local instead of generic, a ramen class with a real chef, a countryside ride with a historian instead of just another bus tour. A year later, by summer 2026, they’d layered AI into the mix to help people find these trips faster. Seems to be paying off too, guests who book something local are 3.5 times more likely to leave a five-star review than ones who don’t.
GetYourGuide, out of Berlin, had a genuinely good year around the same time, passing $1.2 billion in annual revenue and 10 million bookings in one quarter of 2025 alone. And the small operators listing on these platforms aren’t necessarily losing out the way you’d assume. One study tracked 238 tour operators and found their income actually went up 36% the year after joining an online platform, commissions included.
Nobody Trusts an Ad Anymore
Honestly, social media might be doing more work here than any app. Travel content already gets the highest engagement of any category on social platforms, and 72% of travelers say they check a creator’s post before booking something.
But it’s not the huge accounts pulling the weight. In the US, creators with under 20,000 followers now get close to half of all travel ad spending, up from about a fifth a few years ago, and the same shift is starting to show up in other markets too. One creator with barely six thousand followers posted a helicopter tour video and basically sold the thing out for weeks. Follower count stopped mattering as much as whether people actually trust you.
Who Actually Gets Paid
There’s a less comfortable side to all this. The UN has pointed out for years that in a lot of tourist destinations, 50% to 80% of what visitors spend never reaches local people at all. It gets absorbed by big hotel chains, foreign airlines, imported goods, the money passes through the destination without really landing there.
This is the whole reason community-based travel platforms exist. Cut out enough of the middle layer, and a traveler’s money goes straight to the person who actually hosted them. Groups like Planeterra keep funding small tourism projects built on exactly that idea, beekeeping tours run by women in Tanzania, hiking groups led by communities in Nepal.
What’s Coming Next
Tourism boards are catching up too. Something like two out of three now use AI to point travelers toward smaller, lesser-known places instead of running the same five landmarks in every campaign. Travel is slowly turning into less of a checklist and more about who you actually met along the way. Whichever apps win this next stretch probably won’t be the ones with the longest list of tours. They’ll be the ones that make booking an afternoon with a rug weaver in Marrakech as easy as booking a hotel room, and that make sure she actually gets paid for her time.