Three separate surveys, run by three separate companies, are pointing at the same shift. People still want to travel. What they want out of the trip has changed — less lounging, more doing; less August, more September; less splurging, more filtering. Here is what the data actually shows, and where Wingman already fits.

None of this is a single trend with a catchy name. It is three overlapping ones, each backed by a different data source, each changing a different part of how a trip gets planned. Together they describe a traveler who wants to come home having learned something, who has stopped fighting July for a hotel room, and who checks the price filter before the destination.

The name is new. The behavior is not — people have always come home from a trip and mentioned the cooking class more than the museum. What changed in 2026 is the scale. Hilton’s latest trends report puts the number at 72% of travelers wanting to build a passion, skill, or hobby into their time off. A separate survey by the consultancy Future Partners found 39% of American travelers specifically interested in hands-on, activity-packed getaways — cooking classes, foraging walks, outdoor treks — and priced the average “skillcation” at around $7,000, notably higher than a standard beach week.

The destinations getting cited most often in the trend pieces are specific: hiking treks through Italy’s Dolomites, surf and cooking retreats around Peniche on the Portuguese coast, trail walks through Sri Lanka’s Knuckles Mountain Range. The common thread isn’t the location. It’s a trip built around doing something with your hands rather than watching something from a coach seat.

Wingman was not built as a booking platform for cooking schools, and it will not pretend to be one. What it does well is the other half of a skillcation: the hours around the class. The morning before a pasta-making session in Naples. The walk to a foraging meet-up point outside Reykjavik. The self-guided context that turns “I took a class” into “I understood the place the class happened in.”

For years the advice to dodge crowds was about the map — go somewhere less famous. The 2026 version of that advice is about the calendar instead. Virtuoso’s Luxe Report, which surveys travel advisors serving high-end clients, found that 76% report rising client interest in shoulder-season or off-peak travel, and 75% say their clients are now actively requesting destinations with moderate weather over destinations with famous names. Forty-five percent say clients are adjusting travel plans specifically because of climate patterns.

This isn’t a budget workaround dressed up as a preference. Virtuoso’s clients can afford August in Santorini. They are choosing not to book it. United Airlines has publicly described “the creep of the seasons” — shoulder season stretching further into what used to be reliable peak months, to the point that airlines are rethinking maintenance schedules that used to assume a quiet September.

The mechanics of the hidden season are the same ones this blog covered when Europe’s heatwave hit in June: travel earlier or later than the crowd, and the destination changes character along with the temperature. Andalusia in June runs 26–32°C and is genuinely one of the best city-break experiences in Europe. The same cities in August push past 40°C and the experience narrows to early mornings and late nights. The hidden season is just that logic applied on purpose, ahead of time, instead of discovered by accident once the flights are booked.

Wingman’s itinerary builder does not know your travel dates in advance, but every city guide in the app carries the seasonal detail that makes hidden-season planning possible without a research afternoon — when the Alhambra sells out, which weeks Dalmatia’s coast is at its most walkable, where the shoulder months actually land for a given city rather than the generic “spring or fall” advice that ignores climate specifics.

The third shift shows up most clearly in what people click before they click “book.” Hotels.com’s 2026 Price Index, built from a global survey of 11,000 travelers and internal booking data, found the “Budget” filter on its site up 1,800% year over year — an extraordinary jump that signals travelers screening for affordability before they screen for anything else. “Rewards” filter use is up 820%. Filters tied to bundled value, like “All inclusive” and “Free breakfast,” are climbing at a steadier but still notable pace.

Expedia’s summer 2026 report shows the same instinct playing out in where people are actually going: searches for California and Florida beaches are up 50% year over year, and searches for outdoor destinations generally — lakes, mountains, national parks — are up 65%. The pattern is domestic, outdoor, and value-conscious all at once: skip the long-haul flight, skip the resort markup, keep the trip.

Hotels.com also found that 8 to 14 days before departure is now the sweet spot for booking — travelers waiting closer to the trip, watching prices, and moving when the value appears rather than locking in months ahead out of habit.

This is the trend where Wingman’s core model — a free itinerary, free audio tours, no paywall on any of it — stops being a nice feature and becomes the actual point. A value-conscious traveler who has already screened for a free-breakfast hotel and an all-inclusive rate is not going to pay €40 for a walking tour on top of it. Wingman’s budget breakdown shows daily costs across three spending tiers for any city before a single booking is made, and the audio tours and itinerary generation cost nothing regardless of which tier the trip lands in.

These three shifts pull in different directions — one wants more activity, one wants better timing, one wants a lower price — but they land on the same traveler, often on the same trip. Here is where Wingman’s features intersect with each.

What this actually means for planning your next trip

None of these three shifts require a bigger budget or a longer trip. A skillcation can be a single cooking class stitched into a normal city break. The hidden season can mean moving a trip two weeks earlier, not choosing a different continent. The value reset is mostly a matter of checking a filter before clicking through. What ties them together is that all three reward a traveler who plans a little more deliberately than “book the flight, figure out the rest later.”

That is the gap Wingman sits in. The deliberate part — the routes, the context, the cost estimate, the seasonal timing — takes 45 seconds instead of an evening of tabs. Whatever the trend, the plan is already free.