The Trend Toward Authentic Travel Experiences

"De-Touristification is what we call this phenomenon, where the result is that travelers want to be perceived as travelers and not as tourists." This quote from the Future Institute's 2014 Dossier Tourism is more relevant today than ever. The trend is particularly noticeable among young travelers: They want unique and local experiences and are looking for contact with the local population, the "locals". For some time now, the idea of the "hotel as home" has been implemented in various new hotel and accommodation arrangements with smaller companies, shared spaces or even by private landlords.

The following are other examples of "de-touristification" concepts:

• Since 2015, the accommodation broker airbnb has been offering a wide range of activities with local hosts under airbnb experiences: from learning the art of homemade pasta in Milan to feeling the samurai soul in Tokyo or exploring the nightlife in Miami.
• Platforms such as freetour, withlocals or showaround also offer their services as apps: free walks with locals, the ever-popular food tours and photo shoots at unusual locations, or simply insider tips on the city.
• The urban boutique hotel chain Henri Hotels (Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Vienna) offers its own unique experiences with the "Henri's friends" program. Regular customers, friends or neighbors of the hotels are, for example, boxer Jochen Schmitt, who invites people to fitness training, vinyl preacher Haru Specks or upcycler Moritz Jüdes, who invites people to work together in his "Workshop for Everything".

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The New Approach to Travel Planning

According to the aforementioned dossier, the question "Where do you want to go?", which is the first question asked on all the world's travel portals, will probably have to be replaced in the future. "Because people hardly know where they want to go anymore. They travel so much that the question "Where to?" is either boring or overwhelming. Where in the world should I go? The more elementary question is: What do you want to experience? What is the trigger for the journey? Maybe it is distance, but certainly not in the sense of a tourist.