What We Got Right—and Wrong—About 2025
From AI agents to floating saunas, here’s how our 2025 travel forecast actually played out.
Before we get into the buzzwords, destinations, and trends that will dominate 2026, we’re taking a beat to look back at our 2025 predictions—and what we got right, wrong, and somewhere in the middle. It ended up being a useful reality check on where the industry actually moved this year.
Prediction: You can get an IV drip the minute you step off the plane.
Verdict: Wrong. Wellness dominated 2025, but IV drips in airports never broke through. They didn’t become a standard post-flight amenity, and hotels didn’t roll them out as an easy add-on when you checked in.
Prediction: AI agents that can actually book your hotels and flights will be introduced but won’t take off.
Verdict: Wrong. They weren’t introduced at all. We stayed stuck in demo-land—lots of polished previews about what could be possible, including ChatGPT’s early booking integrations, but nothing real or reliable for travelers to actually use.
Prediction: A backlash to hyper-personalization was coming.
Verdict: Wrong. The big idea was that AI would democratize luxury-level personalization. But because those tools never really materialized, there was no wave of hyper-personalized experiences—and therefore no backlash.