A morning with National Travel journalists in Crantock, Cornwall.
A packed room, bags of useful content and three properly interesting speakers, all put together by the wonderfully talented Samantha “Sam” Kirton and Hayley Newnham co founders of Hope Yard PR.
I was excited to attend Travel: What Next? in Cornwall, at Halwyn in Crantock. This was a brilliantly organised, genuinely useful event and, importantly, not one of those where you leave wondering quite what you learned. Quite the opposite. I came home with pages of scribbled notes (showing my age!), a few things I strongly agreed with, plenty I wanted to investigate further and a fabulous mental image involving people getting into the sea wearing puffin decoys on their heads. More on that later.
The line up, included three excellent national travel journalists: James Stewart, Penny Walker and Holly Tuppen.
James Stewart is a multi-award-winning freelance travel journalist writing regularly for The Times, The Sunday Times, the Financial Times and National Geographic Traveller. He is @itsjamesstewart on X/Bluesky.
Penny Walker is Head of Travel at HELLO!, following more than eight years on The Telegraph travel desk. She's @pennyswalker on Instagram.
Holly Tuppen is an award-winning writer and consultant specialising in responsible tourism, sustainability, slow travel and nature restoration, and co-host of the It's a Journey podcast.
What was fab about the morning was it drew on the breadth and depth of the journalists who each came from specific backgrounds and represented a powerful knowledge bank of the travel industry’s best knowledge keepers. Rather than the usual what’s hot and what’s not - we were treated to a morning and real insight, analysis an translation of what they each saw as important for travel brands and businesses looking to stand out in 2027.
This wasn't really a list of the destinations we're all apparently going to visit in 2027. It was much more useful than that.
How are people changing the way they want to travel, and what does that mean for the stories we tell them?
I've since gone back through some of the research referenced during and around the session. Booking.com, Lemongrass Marketing, Hilton and Expedia approach the subject differently, but an awful lot of it joins up.
So here's my take. We're perhaps getting a little tired of optimising everything. Including our holidays.
We're buying a feeling, not just a destination
One line from the morning really stuck with me: think about the feeling, not just the facilities. It's deceptively simple, but a pretty good challenge for anybody selling or marketing travel. We're very good at telling people about hotels, pools, bedrooms, restaurants, flight times, savings and facilities. But is that really what somebody is buying?
They're buying the switch-off. The excitement. Time together. Discovery. Reconnection. Or perhaps, after a particularly frantic few months, the sheer luxury of somebody else making the decisions.
There's quite a difference between "seven nights in a five-star hotel with three pools" and "seven days in which somebody else makes the decisions and you finally switch off." Same hotel. Different story.
Booking.com's 2027 Travel Predictions found that 81% of travellers would choose a destination based on how they want to feel rather than simply where they want to go, while 67% want their next trip to surprise them in some way. Read Booking.com's 2027 Travel Predictions
Lemongrass Marketing comes at the same shift through the idea of the "anti-optimised holiday", moving away from cramming as much as possible into every trip and towards restoration, depth and connection. Read the Lemongrass Annual Travel Trend Report 2027
I like that. Perhaps we need to spend a little less time asking what a holiday contains and more time asking what it changes.
From bucket lists to actually doing something
Another idea I liked was the move away from the traditional bucket list towards greater depth. It makes sense. AI can give me the ten things I absolutely must see in Rome, New York or Tokyo before I've finished my first coffee. Simply knowing what's there isn't particularly scarce anymore. What becomes more interesting is the stuff I can't so easily generate myself. Learning a craft. Meeting somebody fascinating. Understanding where the food comes from. Learning a traditional skill. Hearing stories from somebody who actually knows them. Getting through a door that isn't normally open. It changes the traveller from spectator to participant.
This is where Black Tomato's The Keepers really caught my attention. It is very easy to talk rather vaguely about "authenticity" and "immersive experiences". Black Tomato has actually packaged the idea and sells it. The Keepers builds journeys around people, knowledge, traditions and skills, putting access to the people who keep those traditions alive at the heart of the experience. Its Keepers: Ireland experience, for example, takes travellers deeper into Connemara through language, folklore, landscape and the people connected to them. And let's not be coy about this. There is money in that.
If you can introduce me to someone I couldn't easily meet myself, get me through a door I wouldn't otherwise open, teach me something I couldn't find on Google or let me properly participate in a place rather than simply observe it, you've created value.
Place + people + knowledge + access. That's much more interesting than simply bolting another excursion onto an itinerary.
Which brings me to the puffin
One of the examples shared during the morning was a wonderfully bonkers puffin experience around Skomer involving getting into the water wearing a puffin decoy on your head. Yes, really. And if that sounds as though I've made it up, Celtic Deep runs small-group snorkelling trips around Skomer and Skokholm during puffin season. Have a look at the Celtic Deep Snorkel with Puffins experience.
Do I now think every tourism business should put a fake bird on somebody's head? No. Please don't quote me on that. But as a PR lesson, it's brilliant.
"Come and see the puffins" is lovely. It's also familiar.
"Get into the sea wearing a puffin decoy" makes me stop.
It's funny and visual. I can picture the photograph before I've even finished reading the sentence. More importantly, somebody who has done it has a story to tell afterwards.
That's the point. Each of the journalists reinforced something those of us working in travel PR probably need to remind ourselves of occasionally. We can get terribly obsessed with new. New hotel. New route. New restaurant. New destination. New opening.
But we don't necessarily need another new thing. Sometimes we need to look harder at something familiar and find what makes it newly interesting.
the session was also a great reminder that before pitching, however keen we might be to please the client, I think we need to apply our own filter.
Why now? So what? What's new? And I'd add one more. Make is easy. Give the journalist the photography, film, B-roll, person or experience that makes the story instantly understandable and easy to run. These people are drowning in pitches. Make yours easy to understand and difficult to ignore.
Wellness doesn't have to look like wellness
Another thread I found interesting was what we might call soft wellness. Not necessarily another retreat, spa treatment or yoga class. It might be swimming, walking, sleeping properly, being outside, eating really good food, making something, sitting in a pub having a proper conversation or simply turning your phone off. Frankly, all of those sound pretty good to me.
Hilton's 2027 Trends Report: The Great Rebalance looks at how travellers are using their time away to recharge and recalibrate, alongside themes including Growth Getaways, Wellness Rewired and the Micro-Travel Mindset.
One of the points discussed during the session was rebalancing the nervous system. That landed with me. After years of agency life, it's something I'm personally working rather hard at too.
Expedia's Unpack '27 picks up on personal interests, shorter escapes and Un-Adulting, tapping into the appeal of uncomplicated pleasures and a bit of nostalgia. Explore Expedia's Unpack '27
I don't think the important point is that dry-stone walling, pasta making, pottery, bread making or songwriting are suddenly enormous travel trends.
It's what's underneath them. We increasingly want to come home having done something, not simply having seen something. And you might build an entire holiday around one fabulous experience. A really good holiday doesn't necessarily need to announce itself as wellness.
Perhaps it simply needs to make us feel better.
AI can give me 200 hotels. Which one would you book?
This is probably the bit I found most interesting and where my favourite topic come back to the fore - TRUST. We're all talking a lot about what AI will do to travel discovery and planning, ( only 6% of Ai searches are currently converting fact form James Stewart!) but I wonder if we're occasionally looking at it the wrong way around. AI can give me 200 hotels in Italy. What I actually want to know is: which one would you book?
Is that hotel actually good for this particular family? Would you put a first-time cruiser on that ship? Is the restaurant everybody bangs on about genuinely worth crossing town for? If I've got one week and £3,000, where in Italy would you send me?
Those aren't simply information questions. They're judgement questions. And judgement still comes from human experience.
There was a fascinating discussion during the session about social-media fatigue, smaller and more closed communities, analogue experiences and a reaction against the over-polished digital world and what was memorably described as "AI slop". And how young people and businesses are beginning to revese-engineer in to a more analogue lifestyles . Especially true amongst Gen Z, Alpha and even some Millennials. they’re switching back to Polaroids, postcards, craft, hobbies, nature, phone-free experiences and real-life communities. There’s something good, wholesome and hopeful here. And we need to be mindful of this. There's something interesting happening among younger audiences.
So whilst the easier content becomes to produce, the more important it becomes to know whose content we're actually prepared to trust. Friends and family remain enormously powerful because there is genuine TRUST behind the recommendation. But it's worth thinking more widely about the trusted people an influencers around your particular audience.
Depending on the product, that might be a travel agent, personal trainer, hairdresser, yoga instructor, therapist or somebody else whose judgement people already value. For travel, that's good news for specialist businesses. It's good news for travel agents who genuinely know their product. And I think it's very good news for proper travel journalism.
Less time doesn't necessarily mean less holiday
Both the Hilton 2027 Trends Report and Expedia Unpack '27 point towards changing attitudes to shorter escapes. I think there's a more interesting way to look at this than simply saying people are taking more short breaks. Less time doesn't necessarily mean less experience. A two or three-night trip built around one extraordinary meal, a brilliant person or one experience you couldn't possibly have organised yourself might ultimately feel more rewarding than seven fairly interchangeable days away. And that brings me back to value.
Against continuing economic pressure, I don't think the question is simply "is it cheap?" Increasingly it's: is it worth my money and, just as importantly, is it worth my time? That's a much more interesting challenge for travel brands
Responsible travel is also a growing driver amongst female travel bookers.
Holly Tuppen's session focus on sustainable travel and its many, many benefits (People, Planet, Profit) really resonated with me. Back in 2022, my previous agency, Siren Comms, achieved B Corp certification. I was incredibly proud of that, and the principles behind it have stayed with me. For me it was never about collecting another badge. It was about a pretty simple idea: people, planet and profit all matter, and good business should be able to deliver for all three.
That's something I've carried into Force4Good. And travel is perhaps one of the most exciting sectors in which to put that thinking into practice.
I'm not talking about making people feel guilty for going on holiday. Quite the opposite and that was Holly’s point guilt shaming doesn’t work. Seeking the opportunities and benefits for leaning into this important driver for holiday planning and booking is a missed opportunity by many.
Have the fabulous holiday. Eat the amazing food. Stay somewhere gorgeous. Go swimming with a puffin on your head if that's your thing. But perhaps think a little harder about where the money you spend ends up.
Stay with good businesses. Eat at the independent restaurant. Use the local guide. Buy from the maker down the road. Try the shoulder season. Stay another night. Actually get to know the place. There's a massive opportunity for travel businesses here too. Being responsible doesn't have to mean being worthy, boring or less profitable.
The really interesting businesses will find ways to create brilliant experiences, make good money and put something meaningful back into the communities, landscapes and people that make those experiences possible. That's very much my view of the world. I want travel to remain fabulous. I'd just quite like more of the value it creates to stay with the people and places that make it fabulous in the first place.
That feels like a pretty positive note on which to end.
And so finally.
Huge credit again to Samantha “Sam” Kirton, Hayley Newnham and the Hope Yard PR team, and to Will Eustice and everyone at Halwyn in Crantock.
And, of course, to James Stewart, Penny Walker and Holly Tuppen for sharing their experience and thoughts so generously. A packed room in Cornwall, lots of proper discussion, genuinely useful content and plenty to think about afterwards.
Brilliantly done. Definitely one to repeat please!
If you want to dig deeper
A few of the reports James mentioned in the session and that I went back to after the session:
Lemongrass Annual Travel Trend Report 2027
The anti-optimised holiday, depth, restoration, human connection and trust in an AI world. Read the report.
Booking.com 2027 Travel Predictions
Feeling, surprise and changing traveller behaviour. Read the predictions.
Hilton 2027 Trends Report: The Great Rebalance
Growth Getaways, Wellness Rewired, human trust and the Micro-Travel Mindset.
Expedia Unpack '27
Shorter breaks, personal interests, Un-Adulting and less obvious destinations. Explore Unpack '27.
Black Tomato: The Keepers
Not a trends report, but one of my favourite examples of turning people, knowledge, tradition and access into something people will actually pay for.