Everyone Seems to Be Taking a “Fallcation” This Year—What Does That Mean for Travel

Our travel specialists break down the shift, and share where their clients are going.GettyFall was always my favorite time to travel. It’s when the crowds have loosened their grip on Paris, the weather is better in Italy, and the hotel rates are lower in Marrakech. But over the last few years, I’ve noticed more and more travelers at airports near and far in September, October, and November. Indicating demand, plane tickets haven’t been dipping in the same way that they used to when the leaves turned. Open any news app, and you’ll see the headlines shouting from the rooftops: We are in the era of the “fallcation.”“Savvy travelers are establishing autumn as the new peak season for global trips,” says John Clifford, a Condé Nast Traveler Top Travel Specialist and founder of International Travel Management. He attributes this to the fact that more people are traveling than ever in the summertime, leading to crowded destinations. On top of that, summers are only getting hotter. All this, Clifford says, leads to people looking to take their big annual vacation outside of the summer season. The data backs it up: According to Virtuoso, the global network of luxury travel agencies and advisors, bookings for fall travel this year have increased by 59% compared to last year; the network’s agents report a 77% increase in September sales, making it a peak month for travel. October and November sales are up 54% and 71%, respectively.Fall travel is increasing even to destinations in Asia, where the window between September and November is already the peak season. Catherine Heald, another CNT Top Travel Specialist and founder of Asia-focused Remote Lands, says her company has been seeing around 15% more fall bookings in the last few years. But nowhere is it more pronounced than in universally loved Italy, where September and October have become the height of the season, when it’s still “summer-like” in Southern Europe, says Gary Portuesi, a CNT Top Travel Specialist and a co-managing partner of Authentic Explorations. To Portuesi, fall in Italy now means November and December—and yes, they’re seeing a surge in bookings for those months too, when temperatures are cooler, crowds have dwindled, and hotel rates tend to drop. As he puts it, “It’s the new shoulder season.”To learn more about the rise of the fallcation, I tapped a host of Condé Nast Traveler Top Travel Specialists to weigh in: Who’s actually traveling in the fall? Where are people going? And will we eventually have to avoid traveling in the fall, too? In a few years, will we be craving “summercations”? Here’s what the experts had to say.The sun rises over the Italian countryside. GettyWhat is leading to more “fallcations”?At this point, it’s conventional wisdom that September, October, and November are more comfortable times to travel because, in most destinations, you get more temperate weather and fewer crowds in the fall. “Autumn has outperformed summer for at least the past two years,” says Tom Barber of UK-based Original Travel. For Barber, September and October departures are up by 53% and 45%, respectively, compared to August departures. He explains, “People still want the classic summer destinations—Greece, Italy, Spain, Egypt, Morocco—but they increasingly want to experience them without the intense heat.”September is now one of the busiest months for travel company Red Savannah, says Camilla Davidson, its head of destination management for the UK, France, and Ireland. The relentless summer news cycle is also playing a part in this behavioral shift. “It’s all dominated by headlines around European wildfires, unlivable temperatures, endless lines on arrival at airports, overtourism, and elevated prices,” Davidson says. “Many savvy travelers are looking to shoulder seasons to avoid these pitfalls, with the fall seen as a more ‘reliable option’ than the spring.”On the other hand, Cari Gray of Gray & Co., which focuses on private active trips, says that fall has always been her clients’ preferred travel period over the summer season. “So many folks have well-established summer routines like going to their cabins and annual visits to favorite lodges,” Gray says. “They break free in the fall when kids are in school—both in grade school and college—and the weather is perfect for outdoor activities.”An autumn morning by the Marble Bridge in Copenhagen passes calmly. GettyWho are the people actually taking “fallcations”?Travelers with kids in school are often tied to the academic calendar—back to school in the autumn, big vacation periods in the summer. So fall travel has historically been the domain of empty-nesters, young couples without dependents, parents bringing along adult children (or vice versa), friend groups, and solo adventurers. This has largely remained the case in our current era of the fallcation.“Couples and adults traveling without children have the most flexibility,” says Jonathan Alder of Jonathan’s Travels. But he notes that a good chunk of parents aren’t opposed to their kids missing class for the right family trip. “It really depends on the age. Pulling a child out of kindergarten for a week is very different from pulling an older child out during an important academic period,” Alder says.Rather than simply recreating a summer itinerary at a different time of year, fallcation travelers are looking for activities and experiences that are better suited to the autumn season, says Mark Bonte of France-based French Side Travel. Foodies in particular love to travel in September and October to catch various harvests, Bonte says: “Wine aficionados enjoy the mid-October fête des vendanges in Bordeaux’s Saint-Émilion. Champagne is another popular fall destination. Although the exact date varies annually, harvest typically begins in late summer and lasts several weeks.”More broadly speaking, Bonte says travelers who choose the fall tend to be keen on moving “more deeply” through a destination, “whether that means focusing on wine, gastronomy, culture, or a specific region rather than trying to see all of a country in one trip.”The vivid colors of Vienna's gardens captivate in fall. GettyAre travelers swapping out summer for fall?The rise of the fallcation doesn’t necessarily spell the doom of the summercation. “Rather than give up the traditional summer vacation, travelers are adding a second vacation later in the year,” says Julie Durso, a private travel manager at Scott Dunn. “We’re seeing an increase in both summer and fall travel,” says Red Savannah’s managing director for villas Nick Westwood. The company’s villa bookings in June this year were up 24%, compared to the same month in 2025; July and August were up by 65%.Other travel advisors agree that summer travel is not going extinct, but have indeed noticed shifts in terms of where—and when—people are going. “There’s definitely some substitution happening,” says Barber of Original Travel. He observes that the UK market is increasingly staying closer to home during the summer, and their big international trips are instead happening in October or even the Easter season.Alder of Jonathan’s Travels says clients from the United States are saving places like Europe for later in the year: “Europe is fading as a summer destination for our clients, as it should be. When you have the flexibility, there’s little reason to fight the extreme heat and enormous summer crowds when you can experience many of the same destinations beautifully in September or October.” Authentic Explorations is seeing the same trend, says Portuesi; a wine tour in late October was sold out quickly, and past summer trips were more difficult to fill up with travelers who were largely staying in the US.Fall foliage in Japan is drawing tourists who might previously have gone in spring to see the cherry blossoms. GettyWhere are people going for “fallcations”?The short answer: People are going everywhere. Some fall trips, though, are certainly trending among the travel specialists I consulted. Going to Japan for the autumn is big right now, where the fall colors are just as spectacular as the cherry blossoms in spring. Of course Italy and Greece are big, especially for non-beach trips: the Peloponnese and Tuscany in the fall, Athens and Venice in winter. But for travelers insisting on jumping into the Mediterranean, October is still a good time to go. Overall the conventional wisdom holds: weather is better, crowds are fewer, and costs are more manageable outside of the summer season. Whether that pattern will hold as more people eye autumn remains to be seen.As for domestic travel, Clifford of International Travel Management says his clients are “focused on places where you can easily escape the crowds: the historic coastal estates of Newport, Rhode Island, the open spaces and private ranches of Big Sky, Montana, and the high-desert mountains of Santa Fe, New Mexico.”How is the travel industry meeting the moment?Now that September is squarely part of the summer travel schedule, “shoulder season” and “off season” are being pushed later into the year. This means some seasonal destinations and hotels are staying open longer. Gray of Gray & Co. name checks popular destinations that used to shutter at summer’s close, like the Amalfi Coast in Italy, where hotels like Palazzo Avino in Ravello welcome guests until late October, and Le Sirenuse in Positano until November 1. Gray says that the task of hoteliers and restaurateurs extending their seasons is to keep up the level of service and energy as one would expect in the summertime.The cruise industry, too, is investing in fall and winter travel. Cruise lines like Regent Seven Seas and Explora Journeys are operating their first full winter seasons in the Mediterranean this year. Cruises expert Mary Jean Tully of Tully Luxury Travel sailed with Explora in November last year and says, “It was fabulous. No crowds. The weather was fresh but not cold. It’s a great time to go.”Additionally, airlines are making moves for the fall and even the winter, extending seasonal flight routes beyond their usual September cutoffs. For example, United Airlines will operate its thrice-weekly flight between Newark International Airport and Palermo, Sicily, until mid-December this year. Delta is operating flights from New York-JFK to Catania in Sicily and Porto in Portugal through January 2027.The leaves turn in a park in Vienna's city center. GettyWhat are the potential repercussions of the “fallcation”?The fallcation began as an escape from the heat and crowds of high summer, but its longer-term effect may be to redraw the entire travel calendar. Barber expects that seasons will shift: “September and October will stop being the ‘shoulder season.’ In the most popular parts of southern Europe, they’ll increasingly become part of the main season, with higher hotel rates, tighter availability, and fuller flights. Destinations will stay open longer. Hotels, beach clubs, restaurants, guides, and seasonal flight routes have a commercial reason to extend their seasons.”We’re already seeing this happening, though the adjustments currently seem like temporary novelties. There’s a world in which fall becomes a high-traffic season too. “That could be hugely positive for local employment, making tourism less dependent on an eight-week summer bonanza,” Barber says.“If fall travel continues to grow, certain destinations could eventually face some of the same pressures we're seeing in peak summer,” says Bonte of French Side Travel. He makes the case for cultivating travel programming that does not simply repeat its old mistakes—“reshuffling by destination” rather than the creation of “a single new peak season.”Regions could start reverting to the seasons that actually suit them, Bonte says, rather than times of year into which they’ve been pigeonholed. As opposed to a summer spree, the French Riviera could become hot for winter again, as it historically had been; the Alps could pick up as a summer destination. “Each region in France has a season where it truly shines, and the opportunity is to match travelers to that, rather than pushing everyone into the same few months,” he says. It’s work that falls on travel specialists to accomplish as well, to spread the travel traffic around—to bring it not only to the destinations that need it, but the parts of the calendar that do too.The Dolomites rise behind the turning leaves of a forest in South Tyrol, Italy. GettyIs there still an off season in the age of the “fallcation”?Every part of the calendar is largely claimed by a good reason—and a good place—to travel. Put another way, one place’s “off season” may be another destination’s perfect window. Portuesi says the dead-of-winter months of January and February are still considered the low season in Europe, save for ski destinations like the Dolomites. Meanwhile, that’s one of the best times to go to the Caribbean because hurricane season is usually over by Christmas.For other places, what we might traditionally assume to be peak season is actually low season. Take Asia, for example. “Rainy periods in Southeast Asia and Japan also generally coincide with the summer months,” says Heald of Remote Lands. “But even then, some travelers will visit because it is the only time their schedules allow. In Japan, summers can be extremely hot and humid, yet travelers continue to go.”“I really don't think there is such a thing as an off-season anymore,” Alder says, adamant that the idea of everyone going to the same place at the same time of year is not sustainable or desirable. Besides, there’s a whole world out there and an entire calendar to consider. As Alder puts it, “There's almost always a great place to go, and increasingly we're helping clients identify when a destination is at its best for them, rather than simply when it's traditionally considered peak season.”Matt Ortile is an associate editor at Condé Nast Traveler. He covers, among many topics: wine and spirits, LGBTQ+ travel, and—as a co-lead editor of the Bright Ideas in Travel franchise—sustainable and ethical tourism. As a writer, Ortile has reported from destinations like France, Saudi Arabia; Palau; Panama; and the ... Read More