Reporting and tourism trends in the fact check: pressrelations and IPK present the Travel Study 2025

The desire to travel is unbroken - where are people drawn to and which media trends influence their vacation wishes? Sustainability is a particularly frequent topic in the media in 2024 - tourists continue to prefer established destinations such as Spain.

The new Travel Study 2025 by pressrelations and IPK reveals:

• More travel than ever before: over 30,000 analyzed media articles and more than 300 million trips abroad in 2024 in 5 selected source markets show that tourism is booming like never before.
• Sustainability top topic in the media for the first time: For the first time, sustainability and travel are being discussed more frequently in the media than classic top topics such as hotel and flight ticket prices.
• Overtourism recognized - but not solved: Media clearly address the challenges of overtourism, but often do not provide any alternatives or proposed solutions.

With the current edition of their short study Focus on Travel Trends 2025, pressrelations and IPK International once again provide exclusive insights into the comparison between media reporting on the topic of travel and real travel behavior. The results encourage a critical examination of the differences between public perception and actual developments.

In the third edition, the two partners - media observer pressrelations and tourism researcher IPK International - analyze ten key travel topics, twelve popular destinations and five international source markets. To do this, pressrelations evaluated over 30,000 online articles from international media in five countries and IPK International drew on the latest travel data from the World Travel Monitor^®.

Topics that move - discourses that lead

This year's study shows: The topic of sustainability has taken the lead in the media travel debate for the first time. But does this correspond to real travel behavior? To what extent do media reports determine where travelers actually go?

“Media attention for sustainability in tourism has almost doubled - but this has no impact on travel behavior: 43% of travelers say that sustainability does not play a role in their planning - unchanged from the previous year.” - Moritz Bohrer, IPK International

In addition to classic topics such as budget tourism or climate protection, the study also analyzes so-called niche topics - such as medical tourism, LGBTQ+ or new technologies in the travel environment - and shows where a higher media dynamic is most likely to be expected in the future.

Relevance for tourism professionals, communication & media

The results offer valuable orientation for:

• Tourism organizations and travel providers who want to strategically manage travel flows and media visibility
• Communications managers who want to know the extent to which media influence travel decisions
• Editors who want to set topics but also better understand their impact

"Tourism reporting reflects social debates - from sustainability to overtourism. With this study, we make media dynamics visible and strategically usable."

- Axel Oepkemeier, pressrelations

The complete short study “Focus: Travel Trends 2025” is now available to download free of charge from our website. The PDF also includes direct access to the real-time infoboard, which continuously displays the most relevant travel topics and destinations in current media coverage.

Methodology

For the study, pressrelations analyzed over 30,000 articles from the year 2024. Only online articles from high-reach, national daily newspapers, the general press, weekly newspapers and magazines as well as the trade press in five countries were taken into account: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.

The media analysis was supplemented by data from IPK International's World Travel Monitor^® - one of the world's most comprehensive studies on international travel behavior, based on around 500,000 interviews per year in over 50 source markets. This study was limited to the 5 source markets mentioned. Domestic tourism was explicitly not included in the evaluation.