New Year's destinations? Bangkok and Tokyo in pole but Paris and London not losing appeal

The Christmas holidays are now looming, many are making plans for New Year's travel, but there are also those who are already looking for the 'right' destination for the year to come. An insight into the trends that will mark the tourist flows of the coming months comes from the report "A year in travel 2025" by eDreams Odigeo, which provides an outlook on the bookings and searches already made for travel in 2026 and a snapshot of those that have characterised the year yet to come. If we look at the preferences expressed by Italians, the outlook is quite clear: the choice of travel (75% use artificial intelligence tools to organise it) prefers foreign destinations, adding several long-haul destinations to the classic European metropolises.

Bangkok, Thailandia.

Italian travellers are eager to embark on distant horizons and this is confirmed by the fact that the top 10 of trips already booked are made up of international cities. The desire to venture beyond the Old Continent also emerges clearly from the travel searches for next year: at the top of this ranking are New York, Tokyo and Bangkok (ahead of Paris and London) and also Malè (Maldives) and Sharm el-Sheikh. Destinations such as Istanbul and Tenerife also remain popular, along with the classic European capitals Amsterdam, Barcelona and Madrid

Malé, Maldive.

Also driving travel choices over the coming year will be the passion for major events, primarily sporting competitions and music festivals, which are already leading the race to book flights and accommodation and search for the ideal destination. In Italy, the Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina has ignited interest in the Lombard capital, with flight searches up 24% for the period of the sporting event, while the men's football World Cup scheduled for next July in North America is fuelling searches on eDreams for the competition cities of Mexico (up 15%) and Canada (14%). No less impactful on travel dynamics is the appeal of major cultural festivals, which will continue to draw crowds from all over the world in 2026. The most important events on the calendar are in February and involve South America and the Far East: the Sapporo Snow Festival, which generated a 12% increase in searches to Japan, and the Rio de Janeiro Carnival, which is bringing 7% more interactions to Brazil's most iconic destination. Another great protagonist of tourist itineraries in the new year will therefore be music: the 70th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest scheduled to take place in May in Vienna has already boosted searches for the Austrian capital (the increase is 166%), while The Weeknd's eagerly awaited world tour is set to attract large crowds across Europe, with a boom in requests for travel for the dates in Amsterdam and Milan (from 24 to 26 July).

Amsterdam, Paesi Bassi.

Looking at the destinations most purchased by Italians in 2025, European cities of art remain a certainty with the ever-popular Ibiza and Tenerife while the most popular domestic destinations were Catania and Olbia. The most sustained impulse in terms of bookings made by Italian travellers, on the other hand, confirms the love for more oriental seaside destinations: Marsa Alam tops this special ranking with a 101% increase in bookings recorded in 2025, ahead of Sharm el-Sheikh and Larnaca.

Verona, Italia.

Returning to the Belpaese, Verona is the fastest growing city in terms of interest shown by Italian travellers (ranking fourth overall in the top 10), while Cagliari (in seventh place) and Venice (in tenth place) also achieved excellent results. In terms of length of stay, this year 36% of travellers stayed in their holiday destination for 3-4 days, 22% from one week to 13 days and 15% from 5 to 6 days. More than half of Italians (51% to be precise) booked a maximum of one month before departure, 21% one to two months before leaving and only 12% blocked their travel dates two to three months in advance.