Travel News · 7 min read · October 2026

Fuel costs, cooler summers and life beyond EES: the travel trends shaping 2027

From rising fares to Palermo over Rome, here are six patterns in how Britain holidays that are only going to get stronger in 2027.

Short on time? Let us summarise this guide for you.

Six patterns are set to define UK holidaymaking in 2027. Airlines' fuel hedges, built up cheaply in 2023 and 2024, shielded fares through most of 2026 despite the Iran conflict pushing jet fuel prices sharply higher, but that cover is tapering into 2027 and some carriers, Ryanair most notably, are already cutting capacity and warning of materially higher fares as a result. Second cities such as Palermo, Puglia and Krakow are drawing travellers away from capitals and overtouristed hotspots. New regional airport routes mean more people are starting their holiday search with their nearest airport rather than a destination in mind. A quieter trend is also emerging around destinations entirely outside the EU's Entry/Exit System, among them Ireland, Cyprus, Albania, Montenegro and North Africa, since Greece's much publicised exemption for Britons was reversed within weeks. A stark gap has opened up between cheap short-haul breaks and long-haul splurges, with the old mid-market holiday losing ground. And an Alpine summer is emerging in earnest, as destinations such as Grenoble and Chambery draw travellers away from an overheated Mediterranean August.

Every year throws up a handful of genuine shifts in how Britain holidays, buried among the usual noise about bargain deals and bucket lists. Looking across our own research this year, from destination booking data to survey work to new flight route announcements to airline financial disclosures, six patterns stand out clearly enough to call trends rather than blips. Here they are, in the order we think matters most for 2027.

Fuel prices and the return of airline risk

For most of 2026, UK holidaymakers were shielded from a genuine fuel price shock without really noticing it. Most major airlines built up fuel hedges, contracts locking in cheaper prices, back in 2023 and 2024. When the Iran conflict pushed jet fuel sharply higher through the year, that cover absorbed much of the impact: fares for 2026 travel actually fell rather than rose, even as airlines' own profits took a direct hit.

That protection is now visibly running out. Hedge cover tapers off for every airline as 2027 goes on, and Ryanair, the most exposed major carrier for the back half of next year, has already cut its 2027 traffic target and held winter capacity flat specifically to manage unhedged fuel costs, warning that summer 2027 fares could rise materially if oil stays high. This is worth treating as a genuine 2027 trend rather than a passing news story: the mechanism that quietly protected holidaymakers through 2026 is wearing off at different speeds for different airlines, which means both the fare you pay and the choice of airline you book with are likely to matter more next year than they have in some time.

Second cities take the lead

The capital city holiday is losing ground to its less fashionable neighbour. Our own summer 2026 destination data showed France supplying three of the twenty biggest risers, and none of them was Paris: Grenoble topped the whole list, with Montpellier and Chambery also climbing. Italy told the same story, with Palermo, Bari and Verona all up by a third or more. The appeal is straightforward: lower prices, fewer crowds, and a city that still feels like a discovery rather than a tick-box exercise. It is also self-reinforcing, as overtourism measures in first-tier destinations push demand sideways into exactly these places.

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Your local airport is the new starting point

Rather than picking a destination and working out how to get there, more holidaymakers are starting the other way round: opening their nearest airport's route map and letting that decide where they go. It is a shift driven by the sheer expansion of regional capacity. 2027 is shaping up to be a standout year for it, with airlines opening routes from UK and Ireland regional airports that would once have been reserved for major hubs. See our guide to new regional airport routes, or our trip-picker, below.

Life beyond the EES queue

A year into the EU's Entry/Exit System, and with implementation still inconsistent across the Schengen area, a quieter trend is emerging: travellers choosing destinations that sit outside the whole system entirely, rather than hoping a particular country will go easy on them. That second approach had a brief moment in the spotlight when Greece announced in April 2026 that British passport holders would be exempt from biometric registration. The European Commission forced a reversal within weeks, confirming there is no legal basis for nationality based exemptions anywhere in Schengen, and the Greek Embassy quietly deleted the webpage that had announced it. The more recent story is broader and less personal to Britain: several countries, Greece among them, are now informally being allowed to keep pausing full biometric enforcement because the underlying technology is not yet reliable, which applies to all travellers rather than being any kind of British exemption.

None of this is about dodging a particular country's border rules. It is about choosing somewhere the question simply does not arise while the system beds in. For the fuller list, see our guide to six places to go to avoid EES.

The vanishing mid-market holiday

Look at where growth is actually happening and a gap opens up in the middle. On one side, short-haul budget risers: second cities, Alpine towns, anywhere reachable on a cheap regional route. On the other, long-haul splurges, among them Thailand, Sri Lanka, Egypt, the Maldives, Barbados and India, for travellers who have decided that if they are spending, they are really spending. What is conspicuously missing is the mid-market, semi-exotic short-haul holiday, the kind of slot Turkey used to fill so comfortably. Nothing in our data is currently stepping into that space. UK travellers increasingly look to be polarising into two camps, cheap and close, or properly far and properly indulgent, skipping the comfortable middle ground that used to define the default British package holiday.

The Alpine summer heat escape

UK holidaymakers are starting to treat August heat as something to actively plan around rather than endure. Our summer 2026 data showed a cluster of Alpine and sub-Alpine cities rising together, Grenoble, Chambery, Innsbruck, Turin, Salzburg and Geneva, all offering the same alternative: skiing infrastructure, culture and genuinely cooler air instead of a baking Mediterranean coastline. Grenoble topped our entire risers list this year, up 200% year on year, with Chambery climbing for a second consecutive summer, helped along by its role as a transport gateway for the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps. This is not a one-off quirk of the data. It is travellers consciously trading sun-lounger heat for mountain air, museums and old towns, and choosing a holiday that does not require surviving the destination rather than enjoying it.

Taken together, these six trends point in a similar direction: towards holidays that are more deliberately chosen, and more carefully costed, whether that means watching an airline's fuel cover, a cooler city over a predictable beach, an airport-led search over a destination-led one, or simply somewhere that sidesteps a system still working out its own rules. Whichever of these shapes your next trip, our Trip Wizard pulls your flights, hotel, parking and lounge together in one place once you have picked where you are headed.