In March 2026, Fortune ran a headline that stopped me mid-scroll: "Millennials invented the experience economy and Gen Z is reinventing travel itself."
It's a compelling sentence. It's also mostly wrong.
The travel and hospitality industry has spent the better part of five years redesigning brands, overhauling loyalty programs, and rewriting experience standards around the premise that Gen Z travelers are a fundamentally different kind of human. Different values, different needs, different DNA. The research papers multiply. The conference panels fill up. And quietly, some very expensive strategic decisions get made on the basis of a generational narrative that the data does not actually support.
Here is the more useful framing: Gen Z is what millennials were at 24. The same orientation toward experience over stuff. The same skepticism of institutional marketing. The same preference for peer recommendations over brand messaging. The same impulse to prioritize travel even when the budget doesn't quite cooperate. Just earlier in the earning curve, with shorter-form content and a slightly faster trigger finger on the cancel button.
That distinction — life stage versus generational identity — matters enormously if you're a brand trying to figure out where to spend your strategic energy.
The most recent Deloitte 2026 Travel Industry Outlook, based on surveys across 2025, is quietly one of the more instructive documents in travel research right now, largely because of how it groups its findings. Gen Z and millennials are treated as a unit for most of the analysis. And for good reason: together they now account for half of all US travelers. They plan more trips than older generations even in a softer economic environment. More than half of both generations use social media in their trip planning, compared to about one in three Gen Xers and one in seven boomers. Their sustainability behavior is nearly identical: 38% of millennials and 42% of Gen Z take some form of sustainability action when booking. That is not a strategic divergence. That is noise.
Education First Ultimate Break found in its third annual State of Gen Z and Young Millennial Travel report that 74% of both generations describe travel as a non-negotiable expense. Both average close to five trips a year. Both allocate around 29% of their income to travel.
Omio's NowNext 2025 report, covering 10,000 adults across ten countries, found that 38% of consumers will prioritize travel above any other non-essential spending. Gen Z leads that group, but millennials are a step behind — not a generation behind.
Euromonitor's 2026 Global Consumer Trends report does not separate them at all. It groups "Gen Z and younger millennials" under the same behavioral trend: what it calls the Fiercely Unfiltered consumer — value-driven, authenticity-seeking, resistant to marketing theater, making purchases that feel personally meaningful rather than purely functional.
The data keeps reaching the same conclusion. These two cohorts are operating from the same value system. They are at different points in the same journey.
None of this means the differences are imaginary. They are just being misread.
Short-form video is a genuine channel shift. More than half of Gen Z use short-form social video as their primary travel research tool, versus 34% of millennials and around 14% of Gen X and boomers combined (Deloitte, 2025). That is a real behavioral distinction with real implications for how brands show up. But it is a channel preference, not a values divergence. They are looking for the same thing as every other generation: proof, peer validation, something that feels real. They are just finding it on TikTok instead of a blog or a review site.
They travel with different people, for an obvious reason. Omio's NowNext 2025 found that 33% of Gen Z are more likely to travel with friends compared to just 15% of boomers. Education First found that 52% of Gen Z adults traveled with their parents in the past two years, compared to 25% of millennials. Read together, these stats tell a story not of a generation with alien social preferences, but of people in their early twenties: social, still close to home, without the spouse, mortgage, or school schedule that reorganizes who you travel with. Millennials did the same thing at the same age. The data just was not this granular then.
Their relationship with alcohol is genuinely different. Gen Z drinks around 20% less than previous generations did at the same age (Circana, 2025), and more than half have grown more interested in alcohol-free travel experiences in recent years. Conversations around "dry tripping" surged over 200% on social media in the past year. Nearly two thirds of Gen Z cite saving money as a driver, but 48% also cite health and wellbeing. The implications for F&B programming, bar concepts, and on-board experiences are real and largely underaddressed. Brands like Zulal Wellness Resort by Chiva-Som have responded by building zero-alcohol environments as a core positioning choice, not an afterthought. Most hotel and cruise brands are still treating the non-alcoholic menu as an edge case.
They have a wellness orientation that runs deeper than a spa visit. The Omio NowNext 2025 report found that 51% of travelers want to return from a trip feeling recharged, with wellness and self-care cited by 18% as a primary trip motivator. For Gen Z this is not a product category. It is a lens. Healthy food options, sleep quality, fitness access, and mental restoration are increasingly decision-making criteria rather than nice-to-haves. Hilton's 2026 Trends research found that "to rest and recharge" is the number one motivation for leisure travel globally (56%). That is a cross-generational finding, but Gen Z is the cohort leading the expectation that a brand should actively enable it.
Their luxury preferences reflect where they are in life. Deloitte found that millennials associate luxury travel with on-property dining, while Gen Z emphasizes spa and pool amenities. This is being read as a taste difference. It is more likely an income and life stage difference. Millennials in their mid-thirties are on anniversary trips. Gen Z at 23 is poolside on a group holiday. Check back in 2035.
They want more, constrained by less. Omio calls them "Generation Zealous": 34% want to travel more in the next 12 months, compared to 26% of boomers. Gen Z jumped from representing 8% of Americans planning to travel over the 2024 holiday season to 14% in 2025 (Deloitte). Their share of the traveling public is growing faster than their earnings, which is itself a classic early-adulthood pattern.
When you treat Gen Z as a fundamentally new species, you end up doing two things at once: over-engineering for a cohort that does not need you to reinvent the wheel, and under-investing in the continuity that will serve them as they age into their spending prime.
The brands that designed aggressively for millennials as a distinct tribe in the early 2010s are now the mainstream. What felt like niche design became the industry standard because millennials grew up and brought their preferences with them. Gen Z will do the same.
Hilton's 2026 Trends Report, based on 14,000 adults across 13 markets, found that 73% of travelers say their travel style has been shaped by their parents, and 66% say the same about their hotel preferences. Gen Z's parents are mostly Gen X and older millennials. The continuity is built in.
But here is where the "nothing to worry about" reading of this argument becomes its own strategic error. Because there is plenty to do. The difference is that the right moves are not about rebuilding your brand DNA. They are about delivery, discovery, and trust architecture. Getting those wrong will cost you this generation entirely.
Discovery is algorithmic, not editorial. More than half of Gen Z use short-form video for travel research (Deloitte, 2025), and they are not looking for your campaign content. They are looking for real guests, real rooms, real meals, real moments. Being absent from that channel is not a missed marketing opportunity. It is a visibility problem. CitizenM, acquired by Marriott in 2025, built its entire brand on the premise that a great product creates its own content. The rooms, the common spaces, the art are designed to be experienced first and photographed second. The content follows the experience, not the other way around. That is the model.
Treat AI as an enabler of personalization, not a content shortcut. Millennials actually lead Gen Z in adopting AI tools for trip planning (Deloitte, 2025). The more important implication for brands is not about which generation uses AI more. It is that Gen Z has the most finely tuned filter for synthetic content of any generation. They have grown up online. They can smell the difference between a review written by a guest and one generated to sound like a guest. Brands that reach for AI-generated content as a way to fill the discovery channel are accelerating the exact trust deficit they are trying to avoid.
Loyalty mechanics need rethinking. Traditional earn-and-burn programs were designed for frequent business travelers with long time horizons and stable incomes. Gen Z travels frequently but earns less. They need value to feel immediate and tangible, not deferred. Virgin Voyages is an instructive example. By scrapping the traditional cruise loyalty model in favor of immediate perks, included dining, and no nickel-and-diming, they made the value proposition legible from the first booking. Flexible redemption, experience-based rewards, and meaningful recognition from the first interaction matter far more than tier structure to a cohort that has been burned by programs that feel transactional.
Design to be experienced, not just photographed. Gen Z is the most visually literate generation and simultaneously the most skeptical of spaces that have been engineered for content rather than lived experience. Properties that embed authentic local culture, use regionally sourced materials, and create genuinely multi-functional spaces consistently outperform on both ADR and repeat visits. The Ace Hotel model — community-embedded, locally rooted, designed with a real point of view rather than a brand standards manual — has proved durable enough that Seibu Prince paid $90 million for it in 2025. The anti-cookie-cutter is not a niche. It is the direction.
Design for the wellness gap, not just the spa menu. Gen Z's reduced alcohol consumption, focus on healthy eating, and expectation of restorative travel are not fads. They are the direction of a consumer culture that is recalibrating what a good time looks like. Brands that respond by adding a mocktail to the bar menu are missing the point. The question is whether your experience is genuinely set up to support restoration, not just to photograph well against a sunrise.
The lifetime value math makes urgency obvious. Gen Z already represents 14% of US holiday travelers despite relatively low earning power (Deloitte, 2025). The brands that earn their loyalty at 24 will benefit from compounding returns as their income grows over the next two decades. The cost of not being in their consideration set now is far higher than it looks in a single-year P&L.
If Gen Z and millennials are operating from the same values playbook, the more useful strategic question is not "how do we design for Gen Z?" It is "how do we design for a traveling public that has permanently shifted toward experience, authenticity, and peer validation, at every age?"
Because that shift is not generational. It is cultural. Baby boomers are increasingly booking on peer recommendations. The behavior that brands have been attributing to Gen Z is the leading edge of a broader movement. Gen Z did not create it. They inherited it from millennials, who inherited it from a world that became wealthier, more connected, and increasingly skeptical of corporate storytelling.
The brands that will win with Gen Z — and keep winning as Gen Z matures — are not the ones chasing the generation. They are the ones building the experience infrastructure that earns trust at every life stage. That is a harder brief than redesigning for a demographic. It is also the only brief worth taking seriously.
Philipp Mirow is Founder and CEO of Meridian Thinking LLC, a brand strategy and customer experience consultancy working across hospitality, real estate, cruise, and aviation. If your brand is working through what this means in practice, reach out on LinkedIn or at pm@meridianthinking.com.