- Europe’s hottest summer on record didn’t stop tourists from visiting en masse.
- Some luxury travel agents say more vacationers are seeking summer trips to cooler climates.
- Countries like Iceland, Norway, and Finland have become go-to “coolcation” destinations.
Few summertime Instagram posts are as FOMO-inducing as the perfectly posed candid in front of the Eiffel Tower or Sagrada Familia, complete with a perfectly dewy makeup look.
But as global temperatures continue to rise, that glowy finish could more likely be from sweat than a shimmery highlight.
The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record in Europe. Heat waves soared beyond 100 degrees in countries like Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain — all while the tourist-beloved destinations contended with record levels of travelers.
Likely, no vacationer wants to spend their precious summer break wading through sweltering heat waves and throngs of sweaty crowds.
Thus, the growing preference for “coolcations” — a portmanteau of “cool” and “vacations” — is born. And with it, a 44% increase in bookings to the milder-weathered destinations of northern Europe and Canada from the summer of 2023 to 2024, according to luxury travel agency Virtuoso.
Move aside, wet, hot American summer. Now, it’s all about cold Finnish summers.
Wealthy travelers are seeking out chill summers
“The stifling hot places you don’t think of as being really hot and muggy have become that way,” Jackie Roth, a travel manager for Scott Dunn Private, told BI, calling out examples like Rome, Paris, and the UK.
Roth has planned summer trips to the latter. But if the timing coincides with a heat wave and her client’s hotel doesn’t have air conditioning, they “absolutely panic,” she said. “Americans are used to a bit more pampering.”
A growing number of travelers are pushing their “Euro summer” trips to the fall to beat peak summer crowds and temperatures.
Others are opting for cooler-weather getaways to destinations like Scandinavia.
Misty Belles, Virtuoso’s vice president of global public relations, attributed the trend to two global warming-related factors: the increasing intensity of heat waves and recent wildfires in Maui, Hawaii, Greece, and Spain.
The latter “really rattled” people,” she told BI.
Europe, as a whole, endured a sweltering summer. However, some western European countries — specifically Iceland, Ireland, and parts of the UK and Norway — experienced cooler-than-average summers.
Previously beloved for wintertime aurora borealis hunting, more travelers (especially those who’ve already done classics like Italy and France) are realizing these destinations’ midnight sun, crisper weather, and smaller crowds could make for a fun summer getaway, too.
“You get a lot of people saying, ‘I went to Italy or Greece in the height of summer, and it was too hot, so where can I go now that’s not so hot?'” Julie Durso, a Scott Dunn Private travel manager, told BI. “It’s one thing to be in a place with that heat, but to have it with a lot of crowds as well.”
Where coolcationers are headed
The “Scandi style” fashion aesthetic, inspired by Copenhagen and Stockholm’s minimalist street style, has retained its grip on #FashionTok.
Now, the public’s love of Scandinavia is bleeding into travel, too.
Melissa Biggs Bradley, CEO of luxury travel agency and media company Indagare, told BI in an email that more of the company’s clients have been “gravitating north” to major Nordic cities.
For those who prefer less urban trips, she called out the “great restaurants and beautiful beaches” of the Stockholm archipelago and the “dramatic landscapes” of the Faroe Islands and Norway’s fjords.
In the summer of 2024, Virtuoso saw an up to 17% uptick in vacations to Sweden and Denmark compared to the prior summer, it said. Looking westward, Belles said the company was “blown away” by the 62% and 89% growth in trips to Iceland and Norway, respectively.
Like Virtuoso, luxury tour operator Abercombie and Kent told BI in an email that Norway has become a “top choice” for its customers.
The company saw “immediate interest” when it launched its first summertime small-group tour of Norway and Denmark in 2023. Amid sustained demand, the itinerary is now annual. (The 10-day tour starts at $16,900 per person in 2025.)
Norway’s upstairs neighbor, Finland, also piqued the interest of Virtuoso’s clients this summer — to the tune of a 150% balloon in bookings. “That’s not someplace we were typically sending clients,” Belles said.
The world’s happiest country accommodated about 89,700 US travelers from June through August, a 7.7% increase from 2023.
Even United Airlines is riding the coolcations trend, too. In October, the company announced it would launch its first summer route from New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International to Nuuk, Greenland’s soon-to-be-completed international airport, in June 2025.
“The savvy traveler has been to Paris, Rome, and Madrid so many times that they’re looking for something different,” Patrick Quayle, United Airlines’ SVP of global network planning and alliances, told reporters at the time. “Our nonstop flights to Greenland will provide new access to the world’s most northern capital and gateway to Arctic adventures and midnight sun.”
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