Craft classes, hot springs and countries most people couldn’t point to on a map. What travellers booked in the first half of 2026, and why it matters more now that AI is starting to do the booking.

Craft class bookings on Tripadvisor rose 88% in the first half of 2026. Eco tours grew 62%. Both numbers come from Tripadvisor’s 2026 Mid-Year Experiences Trends Report, and both reveal the same shift: travellers want to do something with a place, not simply look at it.

Think about what that traveller wants. Technically, a ceramics lesson. But really, they want to fly home with a slightly lopsided bowl they shaped with their own hands, and a story about the person who showed them how. We find that quietly moving. We also think it carries a direct message for every independent hotel deciding how to describe itself online.

Hotel guest experience trends in Tripadvisor’s 2026 data

Tripadvisor’s report tracks experience bookings – tours, classes, and day trips – from January to June 2026 against the same months in 2025. While it doesn’t measure hotel stays, it does show – more clearly than most data sets – what people choose to do once they arrive somewhere.

This year, they chose to take part. Bookings for concerts and live performances grew 87%, mostly in Europe. Cooking, craft, and dance classes all rank among the platform’s best-rated experiences, averaging above 4.8 stars. Fishing charters rose 41%. Even the spa category moved outdoors, which we’ll come back to.

Read together, these figures describe a traveller who has settled on what kind of trip this is before choosing anywhere to sleep. Mastery. Discovery. Connection. Recovery. The hotel comes second in that sequence, and its website has to meet the guest where they already are.

Why guests book: eight motivations, not one

Guests rarely travel for a single reason, but most trips lean hard on one or two. At Wallop, we map this with Converge TMF, our Travel Motivation Framework, which groups guest behaviour into eight core motivations: Detach + Decompress, Restore + Heal, Connect + Bond, Adventure + Thrill, Discovery + Culture, Prestige + Status, Learning + Mastery, and Insight + Transformation.

Set Tripadvisor’s numbers against that list and the pattern jumps out. The craft class is Learning + Mastery. The eco tour and the trip to Guatemala sit somewhere between Discovery + Culture and Adventure + Thrill. A geothermal pool at dawn is Restore + Heal in its purest form.

The framework also works in the other direction. We use it to audit how a property already talks about itself across its website, ads, and social channels, scoring how strongly each motivation actually comes through. The results are surprisingly consistent. Most properties score high on one or two motivations and close to zero on the rest, usually without anyone on the team realizing it. A resort can have a resident naturalist, a cooking school, and a spring-fed pool, and still describe itself almost entirely in terms of thread count and square footage.

That gap has a commercial cost. A guest who has already decided on Restore + Heal scans a homepage for evidence of it. When all they find is a room grid, they go back to searching.

Wellness travellers want hot springs, not treatment menus

Day spa experiences grew 45% in the first half of 2026, and nearly all of that growth came from natural settings like thermal springs, mud baths, and geothermal pools. New Zealand’s day spa bookings more than doubled. Rotorua, a town that smells faintly of sulphur and sits on steaming ground (just look at the storm drains), became one of Tripadvisor’s fastest-growing destinations.

Anyone who has lowered themselves into hot water outdoors on a cold morning will understand why. The treatment list was never really the point. 

For a wellness property, then, the question is a practical one. Does the homepage describe the water, the surroundings, and the quiet? Or does it open with a 14-item treatment menu and a booking widget? The guests in Tripadvisor’s data have made their preference fairly clear.

Lesser-known destinations grew twice as fast

Destinations outside Tripadvisor’s 100 most-booked grew more than twice as quickly as the top 100 in the first half of the year. Central America and the Caribbean did much of the lifting. Guatemala rose 74%. St. Maarten, 57%. Honduras and the Cayman Islands followed close behind, and night kayaking through the sparkling bays of Vieques, Puerto Rico, jumped 69%. In Europe, Albania climbed 60%.

For a 20-room lodge in Belize, this is good news, though not because of rate. The big all-inclusive an hour up the coast will usually win on price and points. Where it struggles is closeness: the guide who has fished the same reef for 30 years, the cook who will happily teach you her family recipe if you turn up early. None of that scales, which is exactly why it’s worth so much.

Our view is that these travellers also tend to reach a hotel website with a clearer idea of what they want. Someone choosing Guatemala over Cancún has usually done some reading first. That makes them a strong direct booking prospect, provided the website answers the question they arrived with.

AI agents are starting to book hotels

AI tools are moving from suggesting hotels to booking them. Industry coverage in late September described Meta’s new Muse agent handling the whole job, from shortlist to reservation, so the traveller may never land on a search page, a booking site or the hotel’s own website. What it asks of a property is fairly unglamorous. Correct facts. Data a machine can read. Real-time prices and availability. Something that genuinely sets you apart, and a checkout it can finish without help.

Virgin Atlantic’s CEO, Corneel Koster, is wrestling with the same tension from the airline side. Speaking at Skift Global Forum in September, he argued that the more capable AI becomes, the more “humans will crave for real experiences.” Virgin already runs an AI concierge that clears routine questions faster than a person could. Koster is just as firm that people stay in charge of the moments customers actually care about.

Hotels sit right in the middle of this. Trips are getting more particular, and the tools choosing where people stay reward particular descriptions. “Breathtaking views and luxurious amenities” could describe any of 10,000 properties. A spring-fed pool that opens at six, an hour before the day visitors turn up? That’s one place. A guest can picture it, and an agent can match it to the person who asked for exactly that.

Here, guest motivation and AI visibility turn out to be the same project. Describe the specific way your property delivers Restore + Heal, or Learning + Mastery, and you’ve written something a person wants to read and a machine can use.

Where direct bookings come from

Plenty of travellers still begin on a booking site. SiteMinder’s Changing Traveller Report 2026 found OTAs have overtaken search engines as the first stop for hotel research. It also found that 18% of people who start there end up booking with the hotel directly, up more than three points in a year. Each of those bookings skips a commission and brings the guest’s details straight to the hotel, which is where the second stay usually starts.

Something has to earn that switch. A rate rarely does, since anyone can match it. An afternoon at the potter’s wheel down the road, booked alongside the room on a hotel’s own website, is much harder to copy. So is a dawn soak with nobody else in the pool, or a morning on the reef with a guide who knows it by heart. These are the details OTAs flatten into a line of amenity icons, and they’re the ones a hotel’s own website can tell properly.

A question to ask of your own website

Here’s the exercise we’d suggest. It takes about 20 minutes. Open your homepage and the two or three pages that get the most traffic, and read them as a guest who has already decided why they’re travelling.

Then ask which of the eight motivations those pages actually speak to. Count the sentences, if it helps. You may find one motivation doing all the work, or a single line about the reef guide buried beneath a paragraph on room sizes. Either way, your strongest story becomes easy to spot, along with whether a guest, or an AI agent searching on their behalf, could find it.

Travellers spent the first half of the year telling Tripadvisor they want to take part. For the months ahead, the question is whether they can see, on your own website, that your property is the place to do it.

FAQ

What does Tripadvisor’s 2026 mid-year experiences data show?

Travellers booked far more hands-on and nature-based experiences in the first half of 2026. Craft classes grew 88%, concerts and live performances 87%, eco tours 62% and day spa experiences 45%. Destinations outside the 100 most-booked grew more than twice as fast as the top 100.

Is this hotel booking data?

No. It covers experiences booked on Tripadvisor, such as tours, classes and day trips. Hotels can still learn a lot from it, because it shows what guests choose to do once they arrive.

How are AI agents changing the way travellers find hotels?

AI assistants are starting to search, compare and book hotels on a traveller’s behalf. Properties with accurate, specific, machine-readable information and a booking path an agent can complete are better placed to be recommended.

Why do experiences help hotels win direct bookings?

Room rates can be matched on any channel. Experiences that only one property offers can’t, so making them bookable on the hotel’s own site gives OTA researchers a reason to book direct.