We still like to travel—despite Greta Thunberg’s protestations. In the first three months of 2026, more than 300 million of us packed our swimwear or skis and headed for the airport or train station, an increase of 6 million on 2025. International tourist numbers grew by 2% in the first quarter according to the UN’s Tourism Barometer. Europe, the world’s most popular travel destination, saw a 4% increase.
“What’s not going to change is the desire to travel,” Glenn Fogel, the chief executive of Booking Holdings told me when asked about the future of the sector. Booking owns booking.com, the world’s largest online travel agency, as well as smaller brands including Priceline and Open Table. It is number 169 on the Fortune 500 index.
The numbers are working in Fogel’s favor. Its second quarter results of $2.54 earnings per share, up 15%, on revenues of $7.4bn, up 8%, beat Wall Street expectations. The share price rose 6% on the day of the release. Tourism within America was particularly strong, offsetting the negative effects of the conflict in the Middle East.
“People love to travel,” Fogel said. “That’s something that the human species has had since the beginning. Maybe it’s why we’re all around the world. That’s the instinct in the system—go explore. We saw that so clearly during the pandemic, when people couldn’t travel. [We knew that] they were just dying to travel.”
