CT Interview: 67% Of GenZ Travellers Take Their Game Consoles On Vacations, Says Skyscanner Expert

Last year, Skyscanner revealed its 2025 Trends Report and the top three entries took everyone by surprise. Why? Our lovely Northeastern gem, Shillong saw a massive 828% increase in search volume compared to 2023. Following Shillong, travel aggregators saw strong searches for Baku and Langkawi. But it is the Gami-Vacation trend that has been grabbing eyeballs, lately. So, I sat down with  Mohit Joshi, Skyscanner’s Travel and Destination Expert, to understand Skyscanner’s travel trends, its business model and how these reports are compiled and what’s new to look out for. 

Rachna: Tell me more about the 2025 Trends Report that you guys have curated. 

Mohit: Skyscanner’s Travel Trends 2025 Report is a combination of our proprietary global travel data, OnePoll survey commissioned by Skyscanner, and industry insights. What we’ve seen in the Indian market is that the focus on global travel is increasing significantly, with 86% of our respondents saying that they are budgeting to spend the same or more on flights next year compared to 2024.

We’ve also seen 66% of Indian travellers want to travel more in 2025 compared to what they did in 2024. This shows an appetite for a lot of travel and it’s moving in the right direction. 

It is a combination of convenience, affordability, and increasing highly disposable income. So, because of that, we see Indians wanting to travel more.

Cost still is a crucial factor, because the Indian audience is value-driven with 65% of Indians considering the cost of accommodation and 62% sharing that flight costs are factors that determine their choice of destination. In fact, according to the report, travellers say that food is the key factor influencing their choice of destination, revealing that Indians are foodies at heart.

After this, what we did was we analysed the data, crunched the numbers, and saw some trending destinations. So, in those trending destinations, we’ve seen the number one being Shillong in India, which has seen a massive 828% increase in search volume compared to last year. 

R: So, the top three are Shillong, then Baku and Langkawi. Right?

M: Those are the top three destinations. And these tie in really well with the trends that we are seeing. So, we saw seven trends from all these insights. 

• One being Sport Mode. Indian travellers want to travel to go and experience live sports.
• We’ve seen another one like ART-Venture, where people want to immerse themselves in art.
• We’ve seen Horti-Culture as a trend come out, where 90% of Indian travellers said that they look forward to going to a garden to visit parks when they travel.
• Then, there is another trend that we’ve seen, which is Gami-Vacation. Indian travellers are getting influenced by the destinations they see in their video games. It also makes them want to go to places where there are e-sports events. According to the report, 62% of Indians see gaming as their leisure activity. That also stems from this Gami-Vacation trend. Additionally, 67% of GenZ take their game consoles as well. This is when we realised that Gami-Vacation is a big trend.
• Another trend we’ve seen is Cowboy Core, with Indian travellers wanting to have that Wild-West kind of experience, like having a campfire or sleeping under the stars.

• And then, the last one is the Astro Adventurers. This is also a big one, which we are seeing with the Indian travellers. They want to experience celestial wonders such as stargazing. There are lots of destinations that have come out of that, Tromsø in Norway, for example, is becoming popular among Indians. It has seen a significant increase in searches from Indians wanting to go there.
  We have also seen price drops in Oslo, Norway. You can have those experiences of the Northern Lights in Norway and then in India, Ladakh is also a place because of its high altitude and clear skies, it’s become a popular place to sleep under the Milky Way.

• There is also Reset Jetters with wellness at it core.

R: We are seeing more experience-driven tourism. Travellers are looking for experiences which are offbeat or maybe are looking for newer experiences, would that be correct?

M: That’s correct, we are seeing that shift from 2024’s trends that focused more on cultural experiences or wanting to see new places but now they are taking it a step ahead where people are focusing on more meaningful experiences, trying to find people and connections with these experiences. 

R: How is this report compiled? And how is the trend calculated?  If I’m not wrong, Skyscanner is an aggregator, right? You don’t sell tickets. You see on an inclination basis. So, is a search query the determining factor for the report to be compiled, or is there a different algorithm you have in place to see how you’re tracking?

M: There are a couple of things. Skyscanner is a meta-search engine. We are present in 52 countries across 32 different languages. We collect data from all our different partners and at the end it is a combination of search data and redirects. When a traveller is searching for a destination, we get insights on what’s being searched by Indian travellers more and in what month, and then when they redirect to a partner website, we take that as an indication that they are going to the partner website to book their ticket. So we don’t collect any traveller’s data, but it’s a combination of these searches.

But then there is another one where we’ve conducted a survey using our third-party partner OnePoll. Through these surveys of Indian travellers, we get information on what kind of travel they like, and what are the insights, where they want to travel. That’s how we came up with these 7 trends that I’ve talked to you about. It’s a combination of both.

R:  Okay, so how many participants were in the survey?

M: For the Indian market, we got around 1,000 participants for the survey.

R: Since I use Skyscanner a lot for my searches, it’s not that I always end up booking a ticket when I am directed to the partner website.  When you mention the redirect, I go to the redirected website,  I compare my data, I compare my dates and flights and chances are that I may not book. So there is some skewed data, if you see it from a traveller perspective, like, not every redirect is leading to a conversion. So, how untainted is the final data on your part?

M: This information is mainly on the search that is done. So, if you search from Mumbai to New Delhi and then you search for that data, we see that as a search and we take that as the information and that’s how we’ve compiled the results of what people have been searching so we’ve seen searches for Shillong being very high and this data is also looking at January to June 2024 compared to January to June 2023.

The top three destinations, in terms of search volumes, are Shillong, Baku and Langkawi. Baku was the top one in 2023, and we’ve seen Baku’s searches increase in 2024 as compared to 2023. You can imagine Baku if you see overall is still very high up there because although they had a high search in 2023, the search in 2024 is even higher. So, that’s how we are compiling data based on what travellers are searching for.

R: I have heard the trends that you have mapped and you have mentioned, but there are other trends also which are like being talked about in the industry, be it gig tripping or be it culinary tourism for that matter. So, I mean how indicative was the polling result of that? Did those results also come up? 

M: Yes. So, we had some information about food which is very important for the Indian market as you can imagine. We’ve seen that from the report 54% of Indians look at food options before deciding on the destination. So, food is very important for the Indian market. We’ve seen that in the culinary fit of it. From a gig-tripping perspective, we saw this was one of the big trends from 2024’s report.

People wanting to travel for gigs, for example, Coldplay came to India or during Taylor Swift’s Singapore leg we saw a spike in the increase of searches as well and we see that continuing.

For 2025, we’ve seen a step ahead in ART-Venture experiences. It’s people wanting to go not just to see art from a distance but to immerse themselves in art like the Van Gogh experience that happened in India. There’s a digital museum that opened in Tokyo, Japan ( (teamLab Borderless: MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM)) which I think has seen over a million people already, and it’s becoming popular. So, it’s more like an immersive, connected experience rather than just going for the sake of travel. 

Also Read: CT Interview: 98% Indians Want To See New Places, Sleep Tourism Soars, & More “Everywhere” Insights By Travel Expert

R: Right. So, the report also talks about the list of destinations that are popular amongst those trends? Can you share a few examples?

M: The top destinations that we’ve seen where the prices have dropped for example, these are the ones where things are getting popular. Almaty in Kazakhstan for example has seen a 44% increase compared to the period in 2023. It’s a combination of not only the price drop but also connectivity and more airlines. Lots of countries are seeing ease of visa restrictions now. So, travelling for Indians is becoming slightly easier. 

R: Is there a particular quarter where these trends see an uptick or a rise? Let’s say in the first quarter more of say stargazing and astro-tourism, or in the second quarter it’s more culturally related. Have we analysed data according to quarters also?

M: Horti-Culture is quite driven by seasonal experiences. For instance, Cherry blossoms in Shillong are in bloom during the month of November. The best time to see lavender fields is in July in Kashmir. When it comes to Astro Adventurers trends, Indians are visiting Tromsø or Oslo in Norway to see the Northern Lights and the best time of the year to see this phenomenon is between late September and March. Since we are talking about value-driven Indians. 

R: What’s Skyscanner’s business model like? As you mentioned, you are a search engine, sort of an aggregator. So where do you draw your business from? Where do you get your profits from?

M: Skyscanner is a global travel agency. It’s a meta-search engine. So what we want to do primarily is to make it easier for our audience to come to this one platform to do everything end to end, right from inspiration to planning to booking. And we try to provide all the tools that can help you make those decisions. We have partners, we work with airlines, and we have different revenue streams there, but we don’t charge travellers to come to our website to have those searches. That’s how our business model works at the moment.

And we are looking at artificial intelligence as well because that is shaping the landscape. So we’re constantly trying to figure out ways where we can implement that within the tools so that it can be made easier for the travellers. We have the Savvy Search where you can just put in a prompt and it gives you a curated list of destination recommendations.

There are also vibes (like Underrated Destinations, Beach, Art and Culture, Great food, Outdoor Adventures. Nightlife and entertainment) if you search for that Explore Everywhere search function that suggests destinations based on the vibe filter that you select. 

Also Read: Skyscanner Introduces ‘DROPS’, A Real-Time Alert That Finds Flights 20% Cheaper Instantly!

R: When you’re saying you want it to be a tool for all travellers, don’t you think it’s a great addition that you should also have some partnership with some portal or company which will allow your users also to have more visa guides on the website for people to understand which country is visa-free, to understand what are the visa requirements per country?

M: We are constantly trying to understand all these pain points among Indian travellers through our local surveys. One of our main points, other than making sure we get the best value for the trip we go to, or trying to find the best food option, the other one is the visa. How quickly can we get the visa, and how easy is it to get the visa? We are trying to get this feedback, and our research team and our product team are constantly working on different developments.

There isn’t something that I can share just now, which is in the pipeline, but these are elements that we want to factor in to make this a one-stop app for travellers.

R: Do you think we’ll hear something this year? 

M: We are trying to get more and more things in. We are trying to grow in the Indian market, and as the years progress, this will become our top market, for sure.

R: So, which is the biggest market for Skyscanner?

M: Globally, we are big in Europe and in Asia. And in Europe, we are the number one travel app, and that is the position we would want to be in place everywhere around the world.

R: With regards to India, there are so many market players already, I mean it’s such a huge market, so what’s the edge that Skyscanner has that other aggregator platforms don’t?

M:  Skyscanner is a global market player, so we want to just make sure that we give the fairest comparisons of all different parties in one place itself. It’s unbiased. Skyscanner was the first meta-search engine to focus on sustainability for example, so we show carbon emissions before you book your flight, so we are giving the tools to help travellers make informed decisions before booking their journey. We do 80 billion price searches on a daily basis and our presence in 52 markets and 32 languages shows how we stand out in this market, but we are that meta search engine that is hoping to just give you what’s around.

Also Read: From Astro Adventures To Gami-Vacation, UAE’s 7 Travel Trends In 2025: Report

Cover Image Courtesy: Skyscanner

** It is after the interview, Skyscanner curated a visa guide for its users.
**The interview was conducted before #BoycottAzerbaijan starting trending on social media.