The State of Tourism Seasonality 2026

Executive summary

The third Tourism Seasonality Summit met in Rimini over two days in May 2026 with one question running beneath every session. If travellers are already moving into the low and shoulder seasons, why is so much of the industry still built for the peak?

The evidence that demand has shifted was presented early and went unchallenged. Ged Brown, CEO of Low Season Traveller, opened with three readings of the same trend: the European Travel Commission's finding that shoulder season air traffic is now growing faster than summer, with revenue passenger kilometres up 6.7 per cent in October and 7.1 per cent in November and both now outpacing July and August; the Commission's sentiment study showing 73 per cent of Europeans planning to travel between October and March; and Skyscanner's report that nearly a third of travellers intend to visit the world's most popular destinations only in the shoulder seasons. As Brown put it, at the moment travellers are choosing these months in unprecedented numbers, the supply side of the industry is heading in the other direction, with airlines cutting routes and many of those cuts landing on the shoulder months first.

The summit's central argument followed from that gap. The work is no longer to persuade people to travel in the low season. It is to design for the travellers who already want to, and to measure the right things while doing so. Alessandra Priante, President of the Italian Government Tourist Board (ENIT), framed seasonality as a symptom to be designed out rather than a fixed condition to be managed. Sudeep Ghai, Director of Network Planning at TUI, reduced it to a single line: the growth of seasonality is a distribution problem, not a demand problem.

From there the programme reached the same conclusion by several routes. The prize of the low season is value rather than volume. Priante cited an EY Tourism Advisory study showing that the months with the highest visitor numbers carry the lowest value per visitor, and that value per visitor peaks in the shoulder season. Richard Lindberg of One Planet Journey and Emma Valahu of Inbox Journeys both argued that the low season traveller is a distinct, higher-yield, more loyal customer who has to be reached on different terms. Operators and destinations from Zadar to Malta described the same shift in their own words, from quantity towards quality.

Six findings shaped the two days. Demand has already moved, and supply is catching up unevenly. The reframe of the event was from managing seasonality to designing demand. The community is the real measure of a destination's health. The metrics that matter are changing, and artificial intelligence is now both the engine behind the new measures and the new front door between destination and traveller. The industry's silos, between cruise, aviation, rail, destinations and policymakers, remain the largest single obstacle, and the summit exists in part to bring them to one table. And climate has moved the conversation from mitigation towards adaptation.

A reader who stops here should take away one sentence. The low and shoulder seasons are where better-value, better-fit tourism now lives, and capturing it is a question of design, measurement and collaboration rather than discounting and promotion.

Introduction

Seasonality is not a new problem. It is, as Ellie Wells, Director of Marketing at Informa, said in her welcome, a defining challenge of modern tourism, and one that no single peak season and no single organisation can resolve alone. What has changed is the scale of what is coming. Brown reminded the room more than once that global tourism could double over the next 20 to 25 years on current aircraft order books, and that the destinations feeling the strain of the peak today are a preview of where many more will be within a generation.

That pressure is why the conversation has become urgent. Brown described seasonality as three conversations stacked on top of each other: the commercial one the industry has always had, the human one about who carries both the surge and the silence, and the urgent one that grows louder with every news cycle. The cost of doing nothing is rising. Peaks grow denser, residents bear more of the load, and the environment absorbs the rest.

Low Season Traveller was founded in 2018 on the view that the low season months were where the better travel experiences lived and that the industry had been leaving value on the table. The Tourism Seasonality Summit grew from that idea into an annual gathering, convened by Low Season Traveller and Routes. Its purpose is plainly stated by its founder each year. Brown asks delegates to treat it as a safe space for uncomfortable conversations, with no finger-pointing, on the basis that everyone in the industry is in some measure culpable and no one has yet got this right.

This is the third edition. The summit began in Bahrain in 2024 as a single day for a few dozen people, moved to Seville in 2025, and came to Rimini in 2026 alongside Routes Europe. The series sets out to record what is said, to draw more of the industry into the seasonality agenda, and to set a baseline that each edition can build on.

The programme also shows how the conversation has matured. Several things delegates asked for after Seville shaped Rimini. The request for student and next-generation voices became the Generation 365 panel. The call for a speaker from outside the industry to challenge the room became Dado Van Peteghem's closing keynote on scale and soul. The wish for other parts of the value chain, hotels and cruise in particular, became the year-round cruising panel delivered with Seatrade Cruise. The appetite for hands-on work rather than panels alone became two interactive workshops. Requests for more audience interaction and live polling ran through day one, and the call for concrete case studies shaped the Beyond Summer panel and the Destination Playbooks workshop. What held constant across editions was the signature Brown set at the start: a room willing to have the difficult conversation. One delegate takeaway from Seville, to embrace uncertainty, could stand as a motto for Rimini too.

About this report

This report is drawn from the full session transcripts of the two-day programme. That comprises the opening and keynote, the year-round cruising panel, the Rebalancing Demand panel, the data and AI innovation keynote, the Seasonality in the Skies panel, the Beyond Summer panel, the Seasonality Meets Sustainability panel and the Scale vs Soul keynote on day one, and the Innovation Lab, the Generation 365 panel, the two interactive workshops, the manifesto wrap-up and the closing session on day two. It also draws on the written synthesis of the Destination Playbooks workshop and on delegate feedback from this edition and the 2025 Seville edition.

All sessions were on the record. Where a speaker cited a statistic, study or external source, it is attributed to that speaker and presented as something they said rather than as independently verified fact. Quotations are used sparingly, only where a speaker's own words carry an idea better than a paraphrase would.

The structure is a thematic spine with session detail used as evidence beneath each theme. Six themes were drawn from the discussion rather than imposed on it. They do not map one to one onto sessions, because the strongest threads ran across the programme. Value over volume, in particular, is treated as the argument that connects the themes rather than as a theme in its own right, and it returns in the synthesis that follows them.

Theme oneThe demand has moved, the supply is catching up unevenly

The factual ground of the summit is that low and shoulder season travel is now mainstream demand. Brown's three opening figures pointed the same way, whether measured by what airlines are flying, what Europeans say they are planning, or what travellers are actively choosing. Low season, in his words, is now a deliberate choice rather than a fallback. Rajan Datar of the BBC, moderating the cruise panel, added a further reading from the Booking.com 2026 sustainable travel report he cited, under which 43 per cent of travellers now plan to avoid overcrowded destinations, up 11 points on 2025, and 69 per cent actively seek experiences that leave a place better than they found it.

The supply side is adjusting, but not in step and not at one speed. Brown noted that jet fuel costs continue to squeeze schedules and that route cuts tend to fall on the shoulder months first, where margins are thinnest, so the peaks grow denser and the shoulders grow shorter. The airline planners on the Seasonality in the Skies panel described a more deliberate version of the same pattern. Marc Fischer, Head of Networks at SunExpress, said the realistic goal is to reduce the volatility of the market by extending the shoulders first, namely February, March, April and November, before tackling the deep winter. Reinald Frankewitz of Eurowings and Mantas Vrubliauskas, VP Network Management at airBaltic, described moving aircraft to follow demand, with airBaltic basing aircraft in the Canaries and turning a summer Riga to Ljubljana route into a year-round one by extending it month by month.

Where destinations and airports have committed, the winter has grown. Panicos Tsolias of Hermes Airports said Cyprus now carries more than a quarter of its traffic in the winter months, serving over 100 destinations in 30 countries in the low season, the product of years of close work rather than a single decision. Leslie Vella, Chief Officer Strategic Development at the Malta Tourism Association, said winter seat capacity to Malta has grown at twice the rate of the peak over the past three years.

The cruise sector has restructured its seasons outright. Martyn Griffiths, Director Government Affairs at the Cruise Lines International Association, said the traditional model of a European summer and a Caribbean winter has broken down since the pandemic, giving way to 12-month cruising across regions, a European season now running February to October, Christmas sailings that did not exist before, and one ship kept in the Canaries year-round. He put the sector at 36.3 million passengers in 2025 across 310 ships, with around 54 per cent of passengers from North America, and noted that 80 per cent of cruise passengers later return to a destination they first saw from a ship.

Two voices defined the demand that is moving. Tom Jenkins, CEO of ETOA, pointed to a demographic shift, with the large baby boomer cohort now ageing into the 60 to 80 bracket. These travellers have the time and the money, no children tied to school terms, and increasingly no choice but the shoulder season, because high season capacity in the honeypot cities has become very hard to source. Richard Lindberg argued that the low season traveller is best understood not as a discount-seeking version of the summer crowd but as a different person with a different motive. As he put it, you cannot fix seasonality with seasonal travellers. Emilio José Inés Vilar, Head of International Tourism at The Data Appeal Company, gave the point a number: across the five southern European markets he studied, the low season visitor in the fourth quarter skews towards higher-spending, four-star and five-star demand from the larger source markets, a different and more valuable profile from the summer norm.

The takeaway of the theme is that the curve is already bending. The question for the rest of the programme was what to do with that fact.

Theme twoFrom managing seasonality to designing demand

The reframe that gave the summit its shape came in the opening keynote. Priante argued that the division between high and low season is useful for commercial purposes but misleading as strategy, because it treats seasonality as a fixed status rather than a symptom of decisions. Over-tourism, she said, is a consequence of actions taken by people in the industry rather than a weather event that happens to a destination. The implication is that what looks like a problem to be managed is in fact a pattern to be designed.

Her chosen word was design, and she meant it in its ordinary sense. Designing a destination is like restoring an old house in a beautiful village. You plan it deliberately, you consult the people who live there, and you work towards the result you have in mind. That requires what she called reverse timing, or anticipation. In May 2026, she said, the industry should already be talking about 2030. The same word surfaced independently elsewhere. Debbie Hindle, Chair of the International Centre for Responsible Tourism Global, told the sustainability panel that the word of the day was design, after listening to cruise lines, ports, destinations and airlines describe how rarely they design anything together.

Designing demand begins with deciding who you want. Priante used the image of a birthday party: you would not invite random people to your own home, so why leave the question of who comes to your destination to chance. The point is not to close the door but to hold an ideal visitor in mind and to build towards them. The cruise sector offered a working example of the same discipline. Alessandro Santi, Italy Ambassador for Welcome Ashore, explained that cruise lines deploy two to three years ahead, already planning the 2029 season, and that this lead time is itself a tool for regulating flows. In his words, if a destination does not want a hundred people in St Mark's Basilica in June 2029, it can call the cruise line and say so. He noted that cruise lines were the first to sign Venice's access agreement, ahead of the railways.

Day two turned the reframe into method. Emilio's keynote moved from describing a destination's seasonality to predicting and then prescribing, using events, pricing and product as levers. He cited his work in Menorca, where the destination chose by design to move from a six-month to a nine-month season rather than going year-round, and built a model around it with hotels, activities, the airport and airlines. The Beyond Summer panel filled in the practical detail. Natalia Boveda of Costa del Sol Tourism described actively pushing repeat visitors away from the coast and inland towards the region's villages and gastronomy. Miguel Ángel Perez of Visit Valencia described a calendar of sporting and cultural events, from the marathon to MotoGP to a Mediterranean Christmas, that keeps occupancy near 80 per cent across the year. Marjan Gostič, Director of Contracting Europe at Collette, was blunt that price alone will not move the season for the United States market, and that the work is to create a compelling reason to travel, whether Christmas markets, the Northern Lights, or a festival built first for local people.

Two day-two voices showed how the designed demand is actually reached. Lindberg argued for treating the low season as a premium product sold to a distinct mindset rather than a discounted version of the summer. Valahu described the journey before the journey, the period when a curious traveller is researching and can be guided by an educational email series that explains why a destination suits them in November, citing the example of Tenerife reaching cyclists once the summer crowds had gone. The Destination Playbooks workshop, led by Yrjötapio Anderson, CEO of Visit Oulu, gave delegates six levers to design with: segmentation, demand signal, flexible product, brand, resident collaboration and connectivity. Anderson's recurring instruction was to find the gap in the calendar and design into it, illustrated with Finnish cases from Levi's snow-preservation work to a treehouse-building world championship that draws visitors to a forest in the low season.

Theme threeThe community is the destination

If one idea recurred in almost every session, it was that the health of a destination is measured by the people who live in it. Priante put it most directly. The most measurable indicator of a destination's long-term health, she said, is not its occupancy rate but whether local people are still choosing to live there. She warned of the depopulation that follows when residents of small and beautiful places sell up to seasonal buyers, leaving a labelled but empty destination where the human part of the experience has gone.

The cruise panel made the same case from the waterline. Santi described Welcome Ashore as a community-first movement whose purpose is to help port communities benefit from tourism while keeping people, culture and business in the city. He and Vella both reached for cautionary tales of getting it wrong. Santi recalled a high-standard ship calling at Ravenna on the local closing day, with every shop shut and American passengers left with nothing to do, and a similar experience in Trieste. Vella recalled three ships landing 7,000 passengers in Valletta on Malta's Independence Day some fifteen years ago, when shops and public buildings were closed by law and the visitors walked into a ghost town, with the cruise lines blamed for not checking. Griffiths drew the principle out in a line he attributed to Santi and made his own: if a destination is not good to live in, it is not good to visit. Every destination, he added, has a finite capacity that cannot be exceeded if it wants to be well received.

The Rebalancing Demand panel sharpened the harder edge of the question. Iva Bencun, Director of Zadar Tourism, described a city whose old town is emptying as homes convert to short-term lets, and was candid that when she speaks to local people, many do not want year-round tourism at all. They want a fallow period in which to rest. Tom Jenkins reframed resident resentment as a feature of prosperity rather than of tourism alone, comparing it to the gentrification that makes any successful city unaffordable to the people who grew up there. The discomfort is real, he argued, and largely structural.

Several destinations answered the challenge by putting residents first as a matter of strategy. Perez said Valencia has spent a decade building a better city for its citizens, has been ranked among the best cities in the world to live in, and treats visitors as temporary citizens of that city rather than as tourists to be processed. Scott Lawson, Senior ESG Manager at easyJet holidays, described a project in Crete to connect all-inclusive guests with community-based experiences so that local providers see a direct benefit, which in turn gives them a reason to extend their own season. The Generation 365 panel insisted that younger travellers want exactly this, with the student Tita Butić of RIT Croatia describing picking olives alongside local families as the kind of authentic, low season encounter her generation seeks. The day-two workshops landed on the same point. The Stream A synthesis recorded that no team described the resident relationship as consultative, every team described it as relational, using words like involve, with and together.

Theme fourMeasuring what matters, and the arrival of AI

The summit was clear that the old scoreboard no longer serves. Priante called the traditional measures old metrics from the 1900s: counting heads, arrivals, overnight stays, occupancy and bed capacity, compared year on year. They are useful and familiar, she said, but they describe volume rather than value, and they cannot capture what a destination now needs to manage. In their place she proposed a different set: a visitor experience quality measure she weights at 80 per cent of the picture, a resident wellbeing index, environmental load, distributed economic value, and a cultural integrity score. She also argued for a healthier relationship with evidence, citing the WTTC finding that 90 per cent of European travellers now consider over-tourism in their decisions, and warning against trusting paid promotion, noting reports that a large share of some platforms' reviews are paid for.

Artificial intelligence ran through almost every session, and the closing discussion noted as much. In this report it sits with measurement because, in the room, the two were inseparable. AI is first the engine behind the new metrics. Emilio's keynote showed the method in practice, building a summer-dependence index across Italy, Spain, Greece, Croatia and Portugal that put the region at 59 per cent dependent on the summer, drawing sentiment from more than 130 platforms, and combining capacity, pricing, events, bank holidays and even the perception of climate to move from description to prediction to prescription. Tarek Habib, CEO of Murmuration, showed the same logic applied to the environment, using satellite data refined by AI to produce a carrying-capacity measure that, as he stressed, is not a magic headcount but a reading of how much buffer nature has before irreversible damage, paired with a climate simulator that links environmental scores to the activities and providers a destination depends on. Both, alongside Valencia's survey system and Malta's tourism observatory, use AI to measure what was previously hard to see.

AI is also the new front door between destination and traveller. Priante said 40 per cent of travellers now use AI tools, with what she called a real satisfaction rate of 90 per cent, and that AI works because people extend it a human value, trust. The practical consequence, made vivid in Van Peteghem's closing keynote, is that discovery and booking are shifting from search engines towards AI assistants, which rewards a different kind of online presence, structured for machines rather than designed only for the eye. The Generation 365 panel showed the nuance beneath the trend, with younger travellers split between those who discover on TikTok and research on AI and those who distrust a generic machine answer and prefer a real face. A delegate flagged a gender gap in AI use that the industry will need to watch.

Van Peteghem's own argument was the counterweight. His framework of scale and soul holds that the organisations that win will pair the reach of AI with the human touches that machines cannot replicate, the moments of authenticity, passion and personal attention that he traced through examples from a Rolls-Royce coachliner to the limoncello an Italian restaurant gives at the end of a meal. He cited Gerd Leonhard's line that if you work like a robot, a robot will take your job, and warned, with the example of automated rental-car damage scanners generating complaints, that over-indexing on the machine can cost a destination the very customer it was trying to serve. For an industry whose product is human experience, that is a strategically useful warning rather than a sentimental one.

That tension between scale and soul was, for at least one delegate, the single most useful thing the two days produced. Manila Di Maira of Emotional Sicily, who spoke on the Beyond Summer panel, described arriving with a resistance to bringing AI into her work, for fear it would displace the human energy, sensitivity and intuition at the centre of it, and leaving with a different view. The keynote, she said, helped her see AI as a way to support the scale side of the work so that time and energy are freed for the soul side, the creative and human part. It is a practitioner's account of the argument the room kept returning to, that the technology earns its place where it protects rather than replaces the human experience.

Theme fiveEnding the blame game, connectivity and the governance table

The most practical theme of the summit was also its founder's long-standing thesis. The parts of the industry that move people do not talk to each other enough, and seasonality will not shift until they do. Brown made the point sharply when introducing the cruise panel: it can take around forty Boeing 737-800s' worth of passengers to fill a large cruise ship, and yet cruise and aviation barely speak, absent from each other's route-development and cruise conferences. Bringing cruise to the table at all, he said, was a deliberate act made possible this year through Seatrade Cruise.

Priante set out the governance argument in the keynote. Routes, she said, should be treated as destination design tools rather than commercial instruments, and airline network planners should sit at the destination governance table from the start. She described airlines opening a route to a secondary airport, finding nothing for arriving visitors to do, and asking only then to be put in touch with the destination, when the sensible sequence would have been to co-design the route and its timing in advance. Her call to action was to build the governance table and make it as wide as possible, with aviation, cruise, rail and everyone else who moves people included rather than treated as someone else's business.

The connectivity sessions showed what that collaboration looks like when it works. Maria Kouroupi of Hermes Airports described the airport acting as a neutral catalyst between local stakeholders and airlines, running joint meetings and joint marketing with the tourism board, and building route resilience by understanding why a route does or does not work rather than relying on incentives alone. Ghai of TUI was equally clear that a destination has to bring more than money to the table and put skin in the game, alongside other operators and demand sources. Peggy Croes of Curacao Airport stressed that retention of existing service matters more than chasing new routes, since most of the work is in keeping what you have. The cruise panel supplied the strongest single case study, Griffiths describing a three-way project between the port of Dubrovnik, the city and the cruise lines that redistributed ship timings and resolved the crowding at the Pillar Gate, and Vella describing the way Malta weaves aviation, cruise, home porting and low season activity into one system, down to the cruise operator MSC taking a stake in the island's shipyards to service ships in quieter months.

Policy is part of the same table, and the panel did not duck it. Jenkins warned that a proposed revision to the package travel directive, which he said could impose value-added tax on European holiday packages wherever they are sold, would do real damage to the inbound industry, and that visa friction continues to suppress demand from long-haul markets. The day-two workshops turned the theme into a method. Bastien Hiller of Teejit framed his session as ending the blame game, asking what happens when airlines, hotels, cruise lines and tourism boards stop talking about each other and start talking with each other, and the manifesto exercise pushed delegates to find what its facilitators called partners in crime rather than waiting for the whole industry to align.

The closing session returned to the silos as the central obstacle. Brown walked through the familiar circle in which a destination wants the low season, the hoteliers want it, the airlines want it and the cruise lines want it, yet each waits on the others because they do not speak. A delegate observation that the event risked being a talking shop drew an honest answer: understanding where each party stands is the precondition for action, and the next editions need to move from that understanding to accountability. The school calendar surfaced as the policy question no one in the room could solve alone, raised by Ellie McGimpsey of McGimpsey Consulting as the elephant in the room, given how much of the peak is created by fixed school holidays across Europe.

Theme sixClimate pressure and the turn to adaptation

Climate moved from the background of earlier editions to a session of its own, and the framing had shifted from mitigation to adaptation. Hindle opened the sustainability panel by arguing that the relationship between climate and seasonality is more complex than the popular idea of cool-cations, in which heat simply pushes visitors north. Climate change affects low season weather as much as peak season weather, she said, and the industry has been slow and complacent, with very few entries to her organisation's new climate adaptation award category. Her recurring warning was about short-termism and poor risk assessment. The destinations most at risk are often the ones that say they have no problem with seasonality, water or over-tourism yet.

The destinations on the panel showed adaptation in progress. Vella described Malta's tourism observatory, built with Murmuration and using Copernicus satellite data, which turns the usual sustainability indicators inside out to ask how tourism is affected by climate rather than only how it affects the environment, tracking sea temperature, particulate matter, rainfall and vegetation. He set out Malta's long investment in desalination, which now provides around 70 per cent of potable water, and the reduction of distribution leakage to about 8 per cent, and warned with the image of the frog in slowly heating water that tourism adapts to almost anything but rarely acts in time. Lyn Donnelly of VisitScotland described a four-part framework of spread, spend, sustainability and satisfaction, the loss of reliable snow for skiing projected by 2060, and the pivot of mountain destinations towards mountain biking and year-round experiences, while being candid that Scotland has progressed further on emissions reduction than on adaptation. Lawson described easyJet holidays' work on weather resilience and an AI food-waste system that he said saved one hotel over 100,000 euros in a year, and noted that customer satisfaction falls sharply when weather drops below expectation, which is itself a seasonality signal.

Murmuration extended the point into infrastructure that the industry rarely connects to climate. Habib noted that climate change affects the aircraft an airport can host, through runway length and temperature, and therefore the flows a destination can plan for. Climate, in other words, is not only a question of beaches and heatwaves but of the connectivity that the rest of the summit depends on.

The honest note of the panel was Vella's account of how quickly coordination evaporates once a crisis passes. The intense daily data-sharing between health, transport, tourism and other authorities during the pandemic vanished afterwards, even as a single 2024 heatwave produced a toll he compared to the figures that had alarmed everyone during COVID. The adaptation lesson is the same as the governance lesson. The structures only work if they are sustained.

What we learned

The state of the conversation at the third edition can be summarised in one move. The industry has largely accepted that demand has shifted into the low and shoulder seasons, and has turned its attention to what to do about it. The diagnosis is settled. The methods are still being worked out.

Beneath the six themes runs a single argument, which is why this report has treated it as a spine rather than a chapter. The prize of the low season is value, not volume. It appears as Priante's case that the highest visitor numbers carry the lowest value per visitor, as Bencun's account of Zadar deliberately choosing quality over quantity and holding its nerve when numbers dipped, as Santi's insistence that passengers do not want to be treated like cattle, as Lindberg's higher-yield, more loyal deep traveller, and as Valahu's premium low season product reached through education rather than discounting. Stated plainly, the low season is where a more valuable, better-fitting tourism is available to destinations willing to design for it.

Three honest tensions remained unresolved, and the Destination Playbooks synthesis named them well. On segmentation, the room split between deepening the markets that already know a destination and using the low season to change who the destination is for. On product, it split between sharpening what already exists and inventing something new, with a shared unease that wellbeing and nature have become a default that no longer differentiates anyone. On brand, it split between bridging the old identity and the new one and making a clean break, with each path breaking something. A fourth tension ran through the connectivity sessions, between treating airline commitment as the keystone and recognising, as some delegates argued, that the most sustainable visitor is the one already in the region.

None of these has a clean answer, and the summit did not pretend otherwise. What it established is that they are the right questions, and that they are design questions rather than marketing ones.

Recommendations

These recommendations are Low Season Traveller's own synthesis of the two days. They take a position, and they are grouped by who needs to act.

Destinations and tourism boards. Decide, by design, what season you want and who you want in it, then build towards that visitor years ahead rather than reacting to arrivals. Change the scoreboard: add resident wellbeing, value per visitor, distributed economic value, environmental load and cultural integrity to the headcount you already collect, and use the data and AI tools now available to measure them. Put residents at the centre as partners rather than as people to be consulted after the fact, and treat the question of whether local people still choose to live in your destination as your primary indicator of success. Resist the default to wellbeing and nature alone, since everyone is now selling it, and look for the product that is genuinely yours. Build and chair the widest possible governance table, and keep it running between crises rather than only during them.

Operators, hotels and cruise lines. Stop selling the low season on price. Identify the specific traveller who suits your destination in the low season, the cyclist, the photographer, the culture seeker, the deep traveller, and reach them with education and a compelling reason to come rather than a discount. Use long lead times as a flow-management tool, as the cruise sector already does. Connect guests to the local community and its providers, so that extending the season benefits residents and gives them a reason to support it. Keep attractions, restaurants and experiences open and worth visiting in the low season, because a traveller cannot have a good experience in a place that has closed for the season.

Airlines and airports. Treat routes as destination design decisions, not only commercial ones, and co-design them with destinations before opening rather than after. Let airports act as neutral catalysts that bring airlines, tourism boards and local stakeholders to one table, and share risk fairly with destinations in the low season rather than relying on incentives alone. Extend the shoulders deliberately and build year-round routes step by step, as the airline planners described, and value retention of existing service as highly as new routes. Engage with the cruise sector on home porting, since the two industries move the same passengers and rarely plan together.

Policymakers. Recognise tourism as a system that crosses ministries, and stop treating climate, transport and tourism as separate files, since the impacts cross all of them. Weigh the seasonality consequences of decisions that look unrelated, above all the fixed school calendar that concentrates so much of the peak, and the visa and taxation policies that suppress or distort low season demand. Support the long-term investments, in water, in shore-to-ship power, in connectivity, that let destinations carry visitors year-round without harming the people who live there.

A practical first step sits beneath all of these. The Destination Playbooks workshop produced a usable set of six levers, segmentation, demand signal, flexible product, brand, resident collaboration and connectivity, that any destination can take into a room and work through. The Seasonality Action Manifesto built from that workshop is the natural companion to these recommendations.

The conversation continues

The summit closed on a call to act rather than only to agree. Brown was candid that no single organisation, and certainly not Low Season Traveller alone, can shift the industry, and that the value of the gathering is the community it convenes. He returned to a line he uses often, that change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of change, and argued that for many destinations that point is now in view rather than 25 years off. The ambition he set for the next editions is to move from understanding where each party stands to giving each a share of the action and holding it accountable, and to keep widening the table until the people with the power to change things are around it.

The invitation to the wider industry is straightforward. The seasonality agenda needs more voices, more destinations willing to share what worked and what did not, and more of the value chain in the room. Those who could not attend can still engage with the work, and those who did are asked to carry it outward rather than letting it stay in one conference hall.

Delegate feedback from this edition pointed the same way. Di Maira said the most valuable part of the two days was the sense of not being alone, of finding others willing to question the dominant model and to rebuild the industry in a more responsible and human way, and that what would make the next edition unmissable is the chance to continue those relationships and grow a stronger community working towards change. Her suggestion for Antalya was to root the event more firmly in its host territory, by inviting local initiatives to share what they do well and involving tourism students from the area. It is the same kind of request that shaped this edition, when the student voices and outside perspectives delegates asked for after Seville became the Generation 365 panel and the keynote on scale and soul.

The fourth edition will be held in Antalya in 2027, with a roadmap of follow-ups, toolkits and potential collaborations to come. The measure of this edition will be what is built before the next one.

About Low Season Traveller and the Tourism Seasonality Summit

Low Season Traveller is a resource dedicated to travel in the low season, founded in 2018 by Ged Brown on the conviction that the low season months offer the better travel experience and that the industry has long left value on the table. The Tourism Seasonality Summit is its annual gathering, convened with Routes, and the only industry event devoted solely to the seasonality challenge.

The series began in Bahrain in 2024, moved to Seville in 2025, and came to Rimini in 2026 alongside Routes Europe. The fourth edition will be held in Antalya in 2027. This third edition was convened by Low Season Traveller and Routes, with Hermes Airports as main sponsor; the International Centre for Responsible Tourism Global, The Data Appeal Company, Tourism 365 and ETOA as strategic partners; and SnapSight as the official AI Insights Partner across the two days. The year-round cruising panel was delivered in collaboration with Seatrade Cruise. Each edition is intended to build on the last, so that the seasonality conversation reads as a continuing body of work rather than a set of standalone events.

From the summit