Travel Trends 2025 #6: Horti-Culture (according to Skyscanner)

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Every year, Skyscanner releases its Travel Trends report.

For 2025, the platform identified seven imaginative, hybrid, and often surprising ways people will travel next.

In this series, I take a closer look at each trend through the lens of tourism innovation, experience design, and destination strategy.

Source: Skyscanner Travel Trends 2025 > https://www.skyscanner.net/travel-trends/botanical

“Horti-Culture” Trend Overview

What is “Horti-Culture”?

“Horti-Culture” captures the blossoming interest in nature-based travel, but with a refined twist.

Skyscanner defines this trend as a deep dive into gardens, greenhouses, botanical spaces, and the design of cultivated nature. It’s not just eco-tourism—it’s aesthetic, immersive, and often luxurious.

Think: flower-focused getaways, heritage gardens, floral workshops, or biodiverse experiences designed around touch, scent, and seasonality.

Why is Horti-Culture emerging?

Several factors are nurturing this trend:

  • The global rise in plant culture and the therapeutic value of green spaces
  • A renewed fascination with biodiversity, pollinators, and regenerative agriculture
  • The visual appeal of gardens and florals on social platforms like Instagram and TikTok
  • A growing desire for tranquil, slow, and sensory-rich experiences

Who is adopting the Horti-Culture trend?

Garden lovers, wellness seekers, slow travelers, and creatives are all drawn to Horti-Culture.

It particularly resonates with travelers interested in beauty, craft, and environmental connection—often across generations.

Where and how does Horti-Culture show up?

According to Skyscanner, bookings are growing for trips tied to cherry blossoms, lavender fields, and famous gardens.

Common formats include:

  • Immersive visits to historic or design-focused botanical sites
  • Flower arranging or foraging workshops
  • Glamping or boutique stays set within or beside curated landscapes
  • Seasonal experiences tied to blooming cycles or harvest rhythms

Implications of Horti-Culture for Destinations and Tourism Operators

What does this trend suggest for tourism professionals?

Horti-Culture is a gentle but powerful trend.

It elevates natural beauty as a destination in itself—offering space for mindfulness, aesthetics, and storytelling.

Tourism operators can embrace this by:

  • Creating sensory-driven journeys that center on sight, scent, and touch
  • Designing seasonal experiences around specific blooms, harvests, or cycles
  • Partnering with local growers, florists, herbalists, and gardeners to offer meaningful encounters with cultivated landscapes

It also opens a valuable space for intergenerational travel, inclusive design, and tourism products that don’t depend on adrenaline or spectacle.

Practical applications and challenges of Horti-Culture

Opportunities:

  • Develop itineraries focused on healing gardens, edible landscapes, or plant rituals
  • Create partnerships with artists, botanists, and chefs for storytelling-based experiences
  • Offer calm, photogenic spaces that work equally for reflection and social sharing
  • Use garden design as a narrative tool to connect history, climate, and place identity

Challenges:

  • Seasonality can limit access or create visitor bottlenecks during peak bloom
  • Gardens require high maintenance—especially if opened to large volumes of guests
  • Risk of “surface-level” experiences unless storytelling and place-based expertise are integrated

How could Horti-Culture be localized in different contexts?

This trend can thrive wherever there is intentional cultivation, natural beauty, or landscape heritage.

For example:

  • Curate a seasonal garden-to-table trail linking herb gardens, organic farms, and slow food experiences—with stops for tasting, harvesting, and storytelling
  • Offer botanical retreats in historic estates or experimental gardens—combining flower design, mindful movement, and nature writing
  • Develop open-garden festivals where private or lesser-known spaces are temporarily opened to the public with creative interpretation
  • Create sensorial paths through designed landscapes—where guests travel barefoot, blindfolded, or with guided audio to deepen perception

It’s about giving people a reason to slow down and look closer—to reconnect with nature through craft, color, and cultivation.

Conclusion

Horti-Culture shows how tourism can bloom at the intersection of beauty, ecology, and design.

For tourism professionals, it poses thoughtful questions:

  • How can we turn green spaces into experiential invitations?
  • What new forms of storytelling emerge when we design around plants and seasons?
  • Can we cultivate calm, in a world that moves too fast?

The garden is no longer just a backdrop. It’s the destination.

Only a truly intentional design approach—one that starts from the real needs and desires of people—can create active experiences that are authentic, sustainable, and memorable.

It’s time to move beyond labels and standard packages: destinations need a new kind of direction, able to integrate movement, storytelling, and a sense of belonging.

It’s not enough to follow trends: we need to anticipate and interpret them in a unique way, adapting them to our own identity and the needs of travelers.

If you’d like to explore how to turn emerging trends into real opportunities for your destination, get in touch for tailored advice or new ideas.

And what about your experience? Which experiences or activities are working well in your destination, or what would you like to experiment with?

Share your thoughts in the comments—fresh perspectives are always welcome.

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Sources

Master report: Skyscanner Travel Trends 2025 > https://www.skyscanner.net/travel-trends/summary

Horti-Culture trend page > https://www.skyscanner.net/travel-trends/botanical

Image: Andrea Rossi with Dall-E

Series Navigation

This is post #6/7 in the blog series “Travel Trends 2025 (by Skyscanner)”

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