How Spot is Predicting the Future of Travel
We put together a list of 30 soon-to-be trending cities. ✌️
At Spot, we’re always working to add new spots around the world — to make it easier for you to find friend and expert-approved restaurants, cafes, hotels, and everything else whether you’re home or on the road.
A big question for us at Spot is figuring out where people are traveling to next, so we can be ready to go with plenty of spots for you to favorite, save and explore as you plan your upcoming trips.
Estimating travel trends is harder than you might think. We can figure out where people have traveled in the past few years by looking at open source data on tourism (like these reports from the UN World Tourism Organization), but predicting the future is always a much, much harder question. Especially when it’s something as complex as travel.
And, through our research, we couldn’t find anyone who was combining more than one data source to really try to get an estimation of the next big travel spots.
So, we took it upon ourselves to try. We chose to use three main sources of data:
- We surveyed frequent travelers, bloggers, and our very own Spot ambassadors. Using a targeted group of travel experts, we asked a few questions and listened closely to the answers. We asked things like what cities they recommended others to visit, and what places they thought were up-and-coming travel destinations.
- We looked at the places people were saving and searching for on Spot. We were curious where people wanted to visit and where they were planning to go.
- We looked at external travel recommendations for 2018 on some of the world’s biggest travel authorities, like National Geographic and Conde Nast. Most big travel publications will publish their own recommended list of places to go in the upcoming year — we compiled 13 of these lists.
While these three sources aren’t exhaustive and predicting travel trends is far from an exact science, we’re hoping that these lenses provide some interesting insights.
We tallied everything up, and here are our results… the top 30 trending travel cities:
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Barcelona, Spain
- Lisbon, Portugal
- London, England
- Tokyo, Japan
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Athens, Greece
- Mexico City, Mexico
- Paris, France
- Austin, U.S.
- Lima, Peru
- Rome, Italy
- Los Angeles, U.S.
- Portland, U.S.
- Berlin, Germany
- Oaxaca, Mexico
- Valleta, Malta
- Sydney, Australia
- Tulum, Mexico
- Bali, Indonesia
- Cartagena, Colombia
- Istanbul, Turkey
- Tbilisi, Georgia
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Reykjavik, Iceland
- Marrakesh, Morocco
- Prague, Czech Republic
- Vienna, Austria
- Cape Town, South Africa
- Porto, Portugal
So tell us… what do you think about this project? What do you think are some up-and-coming travel spots, or just places you’d like to visit?
(Note: Most of our users are North American-based travelers and we’ll continue to update the survey results as Spot expands.)
Spot helps you discover the world’s best places and plan trips with friends. Explore your local neighborhood, collaborate on travel plans, and stay up to date on your friends’ favorite spots.
Download Spot for iOS for free here, or visit our website to start planning today.
