It was a trip to Ireland in August 2023 that changed things for Susan Taylor. While her hometown of Austin, Texas was baking in heat and humidity, she landed in Belfast to find pleasant and mild temperatures.
“The weather was so cool and lovely,” she says. “I just loved it.”
The trip transformed the way Taylor, who is retired, traveled. Rather than visiting hot locations, she decided to focus her travel to more temperate climates. “You’re spending a lot of money on these vacations,” she says. “Do you really want to be super crowded in 90 degree weather and no air conditioning?”
As much of the world experiences record breaking temperatures due to global warming, many once popular travel destinations are seeing their summers transformed by climate change—especially in Europe, which is currently the fastest warming continent. Facing searing heat waves, many Italian beachfronts saw as much as a 25% drop in visitors in June and July this year. High temperatures have forced Athens, often crowned Europe’s hottest city, to shut down the Acropolis during the hottest hours of the day. City planners in Paris are already prepping to respond to 122°F days—which they say are not that far away.
Tourists are taking notice of the extreme heat, and in many cases, changing how they travel. As a result, once overlooked destinations—from the Rocky Mountains to Australia—are seeing a rise in summer visitors.
The travel group EF Go Ahead Tours, through which Taylor booked her trip, recently surveyed travelers on the trend. It found that more than half of older Millennial, Gen X, and Baby Boomer American and Canadian travelers said that extreme summer heat was influencing their international travel plans. The leading cooler destinations favored by summer travelers, according to the survey, include the Rocky Mountains, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Australia, and New Zealand.
“When there’s extreme change that we’re finding in certain parts of the world, travelers are attracted to destinations that are a little bit cooler,” says Heidi Durflinger, CEO, EF World Journeys USA. “They’re looking to either travel to destinations that are not as hot [during summer peak months] or travel during the off season to destinations that are a little cooler and more comfortable during that time of year.”
Global tourism is responsible for 8% of the world’s carbon emissions in 2024, according to the World Tourism Forum Institute. But while people continue to explore the world, according to EF Go Ahead Tours’s survey, travelers of all ages are more aware of the impact of climate change and the impact the travel industry is having on sustainability; 75% of global travelers have a desire to travel more sustainably, according to a 2024 study from Bookings.com. In many cases, this awareness is also shaping how and where people vacation.
Read more: We Have All Become Travel Influencers. It’s Ruining the Planet
Sweden is one of the countries that’s seen an influx of tourists seeking out cooler destinations. The country’s tourism board, Visit Sweden, began noticing an uptick in visitors when pandemic lockdown restrictions began to ease worldwide. But when they began researching the trend, dubbed by many travelers as “coolcations,” they discovered that many visitors were looking for more than just more temperate weather. “It wasn’t just about the climate,” says Susanne Andersson, CEO of Visit Sweden. “There was a lot more underneath that trend—[tourists were] traveling in places where there weren’t that many people, looking to be in nature in a sustainable way.”
Earlier this summer, Taylor went to Norway, and she has plans to spend the rest of the summer in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, and Iceland. The more she travels, the more she’s been unintentionally convincing other tourists to change their travel habits. Earlier this summer, she met travelers who had spent time in Italy’s Dolomite mountains, and lamented the lack of air conditioning and stiff heat.
“A lot of times we as Americans are just programmed to think ‘let’s go to Hawaii or the national parks’, and in the summer, unfortunately you find out with the temperature changes in the world it’s getting hotter and hotter and more and more uncomfortable and unpleasant,” says Taylor. “I think a lot of people are starting to pick their travel locations with that in mind.”
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