Hey! In case you missed it last week, we were all the way over in the USA at Collette’s centennial celebrations!

Said celebrations included cocktail parties, cocktail parties and more cocktail parties. Oh, and a cocktail gala dinner.

Just kidding. In between all the champagne, we managed to squeeze in an eye-opening tour of the Collette HQ in Providence, Rhode Island, followed by a conference centred around the future of travel.

And boy, were there some interesting topics being discussed. So interesting that we have one more panel discussion for you to read over! We know, you’re so lucky.

This discussion on predicting hot destinations and trends was moderated by living legend Peter Greenberg (you can read more on his keynote here), and the panellists were Bryan Kinkade, publisher at AFAR Media, Norma Dean, director of speciality sales at Delta Air Lines and Diana Ditto, director of product design at Collette. How could we not cover it with panellists like that?

Kinkade kicked the discussion off by divulging how AFAR Media is able to predict hot destinations – and which destinations and trends are coming more and more into focus.

“We are constantly testing and measuring every bit of content that we put out there to see what resonates with our audience.

“We reach, digitally, a million of the best, most discerning, most influential travellers out there so we have to have an ongoing focus group that we can tease and test. We have as many engineers on-staff as we do editors now, so we can really look at every piece of data that comes in,” he said.

“We’re looking to see what’s resonating.”

According to Kinkade, Portugal, Japan and Scandinavia are the destinations currently resonating the most with AFAR‘s million-plus consumers.

“It’s looking at these destinations that we know our audience is interested in but also exploring different ways to see [those countries]”

Kinkade added that solo travel continues to become more and more relevant, as well as what he calls “travelling unplugged” – both of which allow consumers to experience hot destinations in a unique way.

“It completely changes the way you approach the destination, the way you interact with each other, and I think it’s a really important part of travel that we’ve lost sight of,” he said.

Ditto agreed but cited that millennials have played a large part in the evolution of travel – particularly solo and immersive travel.

“Millennials have been so important to travel design and how we experience destinations today because they were the ones that created this expererience economy. They demand authentic experiences.

“The traveller is so changed. We used to passively experience destinations and be absolutely fine with that, and now travellers want to actively engage with the destinations they’re visiting. They don’t just want to eat the food, they want to learn how to make it. They want to go see [the palace] then they want to go and see [local homes],” she said.

“We have a team at Collette – it’s called our design team – and we spend a lot of time on the road, in the destinations… asking 100 people the exact same question, digging deep, and finding the local experiences. And it’s becoming harder and harder to do in an information age.”

“How do you get on the ground and find new ways to facilitate the exact same experience?” she asked.

Kinkade agreed that older destinations need to be done in newer ways and referenced a vastly undiscovered, out-of-the-way Ethiopian neighbourhood in Paris with amazing food – which gives people a reason to go back.

“We’ve seen that Paris will always resonate with our audience, regardless of our intrepid they are, they’re still gonna go to Paris but they want to do it in a new way,” he said.

Dean said that as well as out-of-the-way neighbourhoods coming into focus, smaller, lesser-known cities are doing the same – as over tourism in countries like Croatia pushes people to explore cities they normally wouldn’t.

“The secondary destinations that come up are a result of over tourism,” she said.

Ditto said Collette is also “seeing a big rise in secondary destinations”.

“We were just in Switzerland putting a new tour together there and instead of going to places everyone goes to, we’re now going to [smaller, lesser known places] like Neuchatel. So as people go back and travel to Europe – and travelling globally – becomes more accessible you can go anywhere on the map, and that’s a new reality.

“We’re seeing these secondary cities pop out of the woodwork and it’s really exciting the experiences that you can have there,” she said.

Ditto also added that whilst “people will always want to go to Venice,” there are other ways to see a major city or attraction, whether that be at night, early in the morning, or offseason instead.

“Are you taking your travellers and waking them up at three in the morning so they get to see the Great Wall at dawn, or are you taking the bus at 10?” Greenberg asked.

Ditto answered that more and more passengers are taking up the earlier option on their tours.