The Five Stages of Travel Are Getting Weird

Dreaming. Planning. Booking. Experiencing. Sharing. Clean boxes. Useful shorthand. Increasingly fictional. Sarah watched her own honeymoon research blow right past the model — talking to ChatGPT about vibes before she'd picked a continent, picturing herself in Greek restaurants before Greece was even on the list. Discovery and consideration weren't sequential. They were the same moment. That's the shift worth paying attention to: travelers are arriving at destination websites already half-decided, shaped by creators, Reddit threads, AI conversations, and TikTok saves that marketers had no hand in and often no visibility into. The website didn't start the journey. It entered one already in progress. The five stages aren't wrong exactly — they just describe how marketers think about the journey, not how travelers actually move through it. And that gap is where a lot of travel marketing budget quietly disappears. The real question isn't how to get someone to your site. It's how to show up in the moments that are doing the actual deciding.