The travel industry has spent years perfecting the moment of booking. Faster checkout, smarter recommendations, seamless payment. All of it pointed at a single event: conversion.
What our research has confirmed this year, however, is that travelers have reorganized themselves around something more sprawling. They research for months before committing. They book and then keep planning. They abandon mid-search over a fee they didn't see coming.
The booking journey has more chapters than the standard model accounts for, and some of the most consequential moments happen outside the window that anyone is currently watching.
Only 5% of Gen Z bookmark a trip when they are certain they will book it. In other words, saving a destination is research and wanderlust; it’s almost never a signal of imminent purchase.
At the same time, among Gen Z and Millennials, 17-18% say they continue actively planning after a booking is confirmed. Not finalizing details. Planning. Still researching, still open, still in motion.
As the journey becomes longer at the front, we are also seeing it extend past checkout. The post-booking window that most platforms leave quiet turns out to be live territory for a meaningful share of travelers.
Researchers become buyers, and buyers keep researching, creating a journey that’s cyclical and irregular.
Hidden fees play a starring role in the middle of the booking journey. 23% of Gen Z and 16% of Millennials say they will leave a site entirely and abandon their browsing or booking when fees aren't clear.
These are engaged travelers who got far enough into the process to feel the friction of an unexpected cost, and then left. That is a mid-journey exit in a population that, based on the rest of our data, tends to stay in research mode the longest. We think those two things are related. Gen Z's extended research cycle may be less about indecision and more about wariness. They are a generation that has learned to keep looking because they expect something to be obscured.
If that's true, the length of that research window is not a fixed behavior. It's a response to an environment that hasn't given them enough reason to stop. Transparency and pricing clarity at the right moment have the potential to shorten that window considerably, converting a cautious browser into a confident buyer sooner than the current journey typically allows.
What makes that worth solving for is how committed this group is to travel in the first place.
Gen Z is adapting around pressure rather than retreating from it. Only 4% say they would skip travel entirely when costs or conditions get difficult. They showed resilience, even when we asked them whether they’d cancel trips at the peak of Spring 2026 travel chaos, with over 60% saying they’re anxious but will “travel as usual.”
They adjust timing, rethink budgets, and find another way through. These travelers are navigating toward a booking and are far along in a process that the industry has made harder than it needs to be. That is a recoverable gap, not a lost cause.
There is more surface area in the traveler journey than most platforms are built to reach. The post-booking window, where a significant share of younger travelers are still engaged and still deciding, is largely quiet in most booking experiences. The mid-journey moment where pricing opacity causes exits is a recoverable loss happening in a population that was committed to booking something regardless. The extended research cycle that precedes a Gen Z purchase is a prolonged window of relevance, not just a delay to optimize away.
The average traveler browses 25 hotel options before settling on one. The journey was never going to be simple or short. What our data is beginning to show is how much is happening in the parts the industry has been most inclined to skip past, and how much opportunity lives there.
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