How Behavioural Science and Community Are Changing Travel

For years, the travel industry has invested heavily in making it easier for an individual to complete a transaction. Faster websites, simpler checkouts, better search, personalised recommendations and increasingly sophisticated booking engines have all helped remove friction from the journey.

But there is a slight problem with that model. People don't necessarily make travel decisions as individuals. Think about how you chose your last holiday. You may have technically been the person who made the booking, but how many other people were involved in getting you there?

Perhaps somebody sent you an Instagram Reel. A friend recommended a hotel. Your partner vetoed your first destination. You checked reviews. Someone started a WhatsApp group. You sent three hotels to the family and waited for everyone to respond. You watched a TikTok about one of them. Then you returned to the website several days later and finally booked.

Analytics might record one customer completing one transaction. Behaviourally, something much more complicated has happened. And therein lies an interesting opportunity for travel, tourism and leisure businesses. What if the next evolution of travel technology isn't about making it easier to book, but making it easier to belong?

Travel booking behaviour is more social than the funnel suggests

The conventional digital funnel gives us a reassuringly simple version of customer behaviour: awareness, consideration, conversion. Real people aren't nearly as cooperative.

Travel decisions move between channels, devices, people and platforms. We discover something, forget about it, see it again, ask somebody about it, read reviews, discuss it with our travelling companions, compare alternatives and eventually make a decision.

Increasingly, social platforms are part of that process.

New research from TUI Musement, published in August 2026, found that 43% of travellers surveyed had booked a trip or activity after seeing a viral social-media post. Meanwhile, 39% said they had visited a tourist site primarily to take a photo or create a video there. For Gen Z, TikTok was the leading source of travel inspiration in the study. That creates an interesting circular journey.

Someone sees an experience through somebody else's content. That contributes to their decision to visit. They experience it themselves. They create content from that experience. Their content then becomes part of somebody else's discovery journey. The customer isn't necessarily the end of your marketing funnel anymore. They can become the beginning of somebody else's.

The behavioural science behind travel decisions

None of this is particularly surprising when we look at travel through the lens of behavioural science. Travel is an unusual purchase. In international leisure travel especially, we're often committing significant amounts of money to something we cannot properly experience before buying.

You can look at photographs of a hotel room, but you can't sleep in it before booking. You can read about an attraction, but you can't know exactly how your family will experience it. You can research a destination extensively and still encounter dozens of unknowns when you arrive. That uncertainty influences behaviour.

We look for shortcuts and signals that help us decide: familiar brands, recommendations, reviews, popularity, expertise and the experiences of people we trust.

Social proof reduces uncertainty

That helps explain the enormous importance of ratings, reviews, recommendations, photographs from previous guests and signals such as popularity or scarcity across travel websites. But social proof isn't simply about displaying five stars next to a hotel.

Different forms of proof may carry different weight depending on who is making the decision. A recommendation from a parent with children the same age as yours might be more meaningful than hundreds of anonymous reviews. A video showing what an experience is genuinely like might remove uncertainty that polished marketing photography cannot.

For digital teams, therefore, the question shouldn't simply be “Do we have reviews?” It should be: “What does this person need to see, and from whom, to feel confident enough to make this decision?”

We want individual experiences, but we still look to other people

There's an apparent contradiction emerging in current travel behaviour. Booking.com's 2026 Travel Predictions, based on research with 29,733 travellers across 33 countries and territories, describes a movement towards increasingly individual, personalised and identity-driven travel. People want trips that reflect who they are rather than a standardised idea of what a holiday should look like.

Yet the more individual our choices become, the more useful communities of people like us can become. If I want a completely conventional package holiday, there are thousands of established sources to help me choose one. If I want a particular experience built around an obscure hobby, dietary requirement, subculture or interest, the opinions of the people who share that characteristic become disproportionately valuable. So personalisation and community aren't necessarily opposing forces.

We want experiences designed for “me”, but frequently use information from “us” to find them. That distinction matters for travel brands because traditional demographic segmentation only takes us so far. Two people of the same age, income and location may have completely different motivations for travelling.

Understanding identity, motivations and communities can potentially tell us much more.

Brand is still a powerful behavioural shortcut

All of this becomes particularly interesting as AI enters travel planning. There is an understandable temptation to assume that AI assistants will become the dominant interface between customers and travel companies. They can already compare destinations, construct itineraries and surface options in seconds. But discovery and transaction are not necessarily the same behavioural problem.

Expedia Group's 2026 research with more than 5,700 adults across the US, UK and India found 53% were comfortable letting AI suggest travel options, while 40% would use it to help build an itinerary. Yet when it came to actually buying the trip, 68% preferred booking with a trusted travel brand rather than an AI chatbot or agent, and 66% said they wouldn't trust an AI assistant to make a purchase or booking on their behalf. That gap is fascinating.

AI can make finding information dramatically easier, but that doesn't automatically transfer trust. And travel requires a lot of trust.

What happens if my flight is cancelled? Who has my payment details? Can I change the booking? Who do I contact when something goes wrong? Is this hotel actually going to exist when I arrive?

A strong brand acts as a behavioural shortcut through some of that uncertainty.

Customers don't need to investigate every aspect of a transaction from first principles if they already believe an organisation is competent, reliable and likely to help them when something goes wrong. Technology might increasingly influence discovery. Brand can still close the trust gap.

Community matters precisely because technology is becoming more powerful

There's another useful warning for anyone assuming travellers simply want more algorithms.

Mastercard's 2026 research across more than 27,000 Europeans found 64% were consciously seeking human recommendations over algorithms when choosing experiences. The same research found 58% were seeking communal activities, while travel and tourism was the number-one category of experience respondents wanted to do more of.

In the UK specifically, 60% said they preferred human recommendations to algorithmic ones when planning days out. That doesn't mean people are rejecting technology. The evidence from Expedia and elsewhere clearly shows growing willingness to use AI in travel planning.

Instead, it points towards something more nuanced. Technology is becoming more powerful at the same time as human recommendation, trust, and connection remain extremely valuable.

The opportunity isn't necessarily to choose between the two. It's to design technology that amplifies the human behaviours customers already value.

From audience to community

This is where travel brands may need to rethink what they mean by “community”. Having 500,000 Instagram followers does not necessarily mean you have a community. An audience receives. A community participates. Communities recommend, discuss, answer questions, create content, share experiences and provide reassurance. Members can become advocates without being asked to participate in a formal referral programme. And travel is unusually well suited to this behaviour because the product itself generates stories.

People talk about holidays before they go. They share photographs while they're there. They recommend restaurants when they return. They tell colleagues about the hotel. They send friends links. They answer questions about destinations they've visited.

The question for travel and leisure brands is whether their digital ecosystem facilitates that behaviour or simply watches it happen elsewhere. There is potentially a significant difference between having customers who talk about your brand and building a brand that helps those customers connect around a shared experience or interest.

What if travel technology was designed for groups rather than individuals?

This brings us back to the booking engine. Most travel websites are understandably designed around a relatively simple interaction between an individual and an interface.

But think again about group bookings. One person is trying to coordinate everyone's availability. Someone has found another hotel. One friend can't afford the first option. Another wants a swimming pool. Somebody needs an accessible room. Three people haven't replied to the WhatsApp message and the unofficial holiday organiser is gradually losing the will to live.

The transaction is individual. The decision is collective. So what would happen if we designed more deliberately for that behaviour?

Perhaps customers could build shared shortlists rather than sending eight separate links into WhatsApp. Groups could vote between accommodation or experiences. An itinerary could become collaborative rather than belonging to the person who made the booking. Availability could be coordinated across several travellers. Payments could be divided more intelligently. Recommendations could account for the different motivations of people within the same party.

The point isn't that every travel company should immediately build these features. The more useful question is: Where does your technology currently force an inherently social behaviour to become an individual one? That is a very different starting point for digital experience design.

Community doesn't stop when the booking is made

There's another mistake in thinking about digital travel purely through the booking funnel: the booking is nowhere near the end of the customer experience. There can be weeks or months between purchasing a holiday and experiencing it. That's an extraordinary period of anticipation in which a customer may research restaurants, excursions, transport, local culture and activities. They may discuss the trip with other travellers and repeatedly return to the destination mentally before physically arriving.

Technology has an opportunity to support that anticipation rather than going relatively quiet once payment has been taken.

The same applies during the trip. The right digital experience can connect guests to local recommendations, other experiences, useful information and potentially other people with shared interests.

Mastercard's more recent European research offers an interesting signal here too. In July 2026, it found 48% of Europeans planned to learn a new skill during their summer holiday, while 51% felt skill-based trips were more meaningful than traditional holidays, particularly when experiences were created or curated by locals.

That's not simply a booking opportunity; it's an opportunity to connect travellers, interests, destinations, and local communities.

The strongest technology may be the technology we notice least

There is a danger in conversations about digital transformation that technology becomes the protagonist. Which CMS? Which booking platform? Which AI model? Which personalisation engine? Those decisions matter enormously behind the scenes. But the customer doesn't particularly care.

They care whether they can find something they'll love, whether they trust what they're being told, whether booking is straightforward and whether somebody will help when something goes wrong.

Behavioural science gives us a useful way of reversing the traditional technology conversation. Instead of asking “What can this technology do?”, we can start with “What are people actually trying to do?” Then we can ask where technology can make those behaviours easier.

AI isn't replacing the travel community. It's joining it.

AI undoubtedly changes this picture. It gives travellers another source of recommendations and another way of processing an overwhelming amount of information. But the emerging evidence suggests we shouldn't confuse convenience with trust.

People may ask an AI assistant where to go, consult TikTok for inspiration, ask friends whether they've been there, read reviews from strangers, check a creator's recommendation and finally book with a brand they recognise. Those aren't necessarily competing channels; they're components of a much larger decision-making ecosystem. For travel organisations, that makes understanding behaviour more important, not less.

If AI increasingly controls part of discovery, strong brands need to give customers compelling reasons to recognise them, trust them, seek them out and recommend them, and if technology makes functional differences between booking platforms less obvious, brand, experience and community may become even more important differentiators.

From booking to belonging

Travel has always been social. We travelled together long before booking engines, recommendation algorithms or social media existed. What's changing is the technology connecting those behaviours. The opportunity for leisure and tourism businesses isn't therefore simply to digitise more of the customer journey. Nor is it to insert AI into every available interaction.

It is to understand the human behaviours underneath that journey and decide where technology can genuinely improve them.

Social proof can reduce uncertainty. Brand can create trust. Personalisation can help people express their identity. Communities can provide belonging and recommendations. Technology can connect all of those things at scale.

Because ultimately, the future of digital travel might be less about getting somebody through a booking funnel and more about giving them a community they want to come back to.