Luxury travel is being reshaped by two powerful trends: inheritourism, where families pass down destinations, hotel loyalties and travel styles as part of their legacy, and elsewhereism, a restless urge to seek unfamiliar, less crowded places. Together they signal a shift from status-driven tourism to slow, meaningful experiences that deepen identity and connection across generations.
If you haven’t been snoozing, you’ll have noticed a trend where people have been retracing their footsteps and going back. Period dramas and 90s retro tint are back in films; speakeasies are the rage in cocktail culture; heritage tailoring is reclaiming wardrobes, and the old has become the newest form of novelty. All in all, we seem to have decided that the future can wait while we rummage through the attic. Much in the same fashion, luxury travel—long associated with discovering new places—now has a growing number of affluent travellers who are looking backwards rather than forwards. In a recent Hilton 2026 Trends Report, the kernel of the finding lay in one word: inheritourism. The word underlines how travel habits, favourite destinations and hotel preferences are passed down from one generation to the next. Not to be confused with ancestry tourism, which focuses on tracing family origins, inheritourism is concerned with preserving family traditions through travel itself.
In an age where parents who previously dissuaded their younglings from being too much on their phones have now come to be tethered to their screens, Hilton's report makes for curious findings in the behaviour shift of the said younglings. Based on an Ipsos survey of more than 14,000 adults across 13 countries, including India, the report suggested that inherited travel habits are far more influential than previously understood. Two-thirds of the respondents confessed that their parents shaped the hotels they choose today, while nearly three-quarters attributed their overall style of travel to their parents and guardians. More than half related their loyalty to particular hotel brands or rewards programmes as having been inherited from their parents, touching presciently on how family influence extends far beyond childhood holidays.
For Loveleen Arun, Founder Director of Panache World, the phenomenon extends beyond family holidays to a deeper search for identity. She observes that as more people have migrated, settled abroad and married across cultures, their identities have become layered, yet “there is an inherent pull in them to go and visit the place where they have supposedly descended from.” While travellers once contented themselves with simply visiting ancestral places, she says the emphasis has shifted towards understanding history rather than merely witnessing it.
Drawing on her professional experience, Arun notes that they have organised journeys for travellers from the UK seeking places where their parents or grandparents had briefly lived, served or even died in India and Bangladesh. What has changed, she says, is that younger generations are no longer interested in a superficial experience. Rather than stopping at folk performances or village stays, they want to understand the events that shaped their families. Visiting institutions such as the Partition Museum with subject experts, speaking with local historians and learning about pivotal moments in family history are becoming increasingly important. “People are trying to find meaning. They're done with superficial travel,” she says. “Going back to your roots, dig deeper and so getting to know yourself more,” she stresses, “is going to increase more and more.”
The findings also reflect a growing trend of multigenerational travel. More than half of parents travelling with their children noted that their holiday group now includes at least one young adult aged 18 or above, highlighting how family trips continue to thrive long after children grow financially independent. The pecuniary dynamics, however, remain firmly in the parents’ hands. Hilton's report noted that about 44 per cent of parents travelling with young adults choose to pay for the entire holiday, while only a minor proportion of young adults cover most or all of the cost themselves. Unsurprisingly, almost six in ten respondents acknowledged that whoever pays usually gets to decide where the family holidays.
This family-centred approach only further complements the recently published report by Bain & Company, entitled Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study, produced with Altagamma. The report argues that luxury consumers are done with signalling wealth and now seek experiences that carry personal significance. It also notes that almost half of Generation Z consumers doff their hats to their parents as far as their preference for brands are concerned. All of this reinforces the idea that an increasingly important driver of consumption is family legacy.
For luxury travel advisers and hospitality brands, the implications are rather significant. Curated family itineraries, private heritage experiences and longer multigenerational stays are fast replacing conventional sightseeing holidays, signalling a demand for travel that fosters family connections rather than merely ticking destinations off a list.
Running parallel to inheritourism is another behavioural shift that Bain identifies as elsewhereism. The word seems to have emerged in Daniel Milo's book Good Enough (2019). Rather self-explanatory, elsewhereism denotes the restless urge to always seek a better elsewhere—whether in destinations, work or relationships. Ironically, while one trend encourages travellers to revisit familiar places with family, the other reflects a growing desire to venture beyond destinations that have become synonymous with luxury tourism.
Arun believes this desire is rooted partly in the collective experience of the pandemic. Covid-19, she says, fundamentally altered people’s relationship with travel, making them appreciate its value after long periods of confinement. At the same time, increasingly technology-driven, mundane and mechanical lifestyles have left many searching for experiences that feel more authentic. “People feel that they just need to get away from what they know, or what they know as real, or what they know as their world,” she says.
She also points out that elsewhereism is no longer confined to forests, mountains or remote wilderness. The unfamiliar may simply mean meeting people one would never ordinarily encounter or immersing oneself in completely different ways of life. In her view, elsewhereism is “an old and inherent desire to get away from it all, but go to someplace which is completely unfamiliar,” where people often discover a sense of peace precisely because everything around them is unfamiliar.
According to Bain, travel beyond traditional tourism hotspots has risen by around 20 per cent over the past year, as affluent travellers increasingly seek destinations that offer greater privacy, stronger local identity and fewer crowds. Rather than returning to the same Mediterranean beach clubs or city breaks, they are choosing places that remain comparatively untouched by mass tourism, even if reaching them requires greater effort.
The consultancy also highlights that bookings for immersive experiences—including local gastronomy, cultural activities and bespoke itineraries—have seen a sharp uptick of approximately 30 per cent year on year. The rise suggests that luxury travellers are placing greater value on spending meaningful time within a destination instead of oscillating between multiple locations in pursuit of token photographs. Slow travel, immersive access to local communities and experiences unavailable through conventional tourism are becoming increasingly important markers of exclusivity.
Arun cautions, however, that the industry often misunderstands what travellers actually seek. She argues that creating stylised tourist villages or offering stays in vernacular homes with local food is no longer sufficient. The real luxury, she suggests, lies in facilitating access to people and knowledge that would otherwise remain inaccessible—whether that means conversations with elderly village priests, access to manuscripts or historians, or other forms of cultural immersion. Such journeys, she adds, “have to be slower” and “approached very gently and thoughtfully.” She also believes that younger Millennials and Generation Z are leading both inheritourism and elsewhereism, pursuing them with greater sincerity than older generations.
Whereas family-led travel styles and looking beyond the obvious are two trends dominating luxury travel, wider pressures stemming from geopolitical dynamics are another factor, according to Bain. As overtourism continues to plague travel and geopolitical crises—such as those in the Middle East and Ukraine—reshape some of the world's most sought-after destinations, the opportunity for luxury hospitality brands lies not in creating ever more extravagant hotels but in orchestrating access to places and experiences that remain difficult to access and impossible to replicate elsewhere.
Both inheritourism and elsewhereism sit within a broader transformation of the luxury market. Bain's report concludes that spending on experiences is expanding around one-and-a-half times faster than spending on personal luxury goods in 2026, with hospitality, cruises and private aviation remaining among the strongest-performing sectors. Rather than accumulating more possessions, affluent consumers are directing discretionary spending towards journeys that offer personal fulfilment, whether that means revisiting destinations that carry family memories or discovering places beyond the conventional luxury circuit.
Arun believes the first and most significant change brought about by these trends will not be the destinations themselves but the travellers. “I think what will change first is the travellers’ sense of identity,” she says. Increasingly, travellers are no longer defining themselves before they travel, for instance, as outdoorsy, or foodie and so on. Instead, they seek exposure to the purest forms of food, art, architecture and culture, allowing those experiences to shape who they become. Every journey, she suggests, leaves them as “newer people, as better people.” The traveller of tomorrow, in her view, will increasingly be “a seeker,” a slow traveller searching for meaning rather than simply another destination.
Taken together, the two trends point to a different definition of luxury. One is rooted in continuity and inheritance, where travel becomes part of a family's legacy; the other is driven by exploration, favouring destinations that remain outside the ordinary. Both, however, suggest that for today's luxury traveller, individualised exclusivity is the byword, whereby the quality and meaning of an experience matter more than the visibility of the destination itself.