Did you have a nice vacation? Anyone who asks their fellow human beings this question in the face of a summer of climatic catastrophes and geopolitical apocalypses is neither a fool nor a provocateur and certainly not a cynic, but a realist. Because most people will answer that, despite all the disasters, all the disturbing television images of burning forests, dry rivers and exploding bombs, their summer vacation was hardly different than in previous years. Terror and darkness are omnipresent in the media, but marginal in everyone's everyday life. And that's exactly why the Armageddon of travel has been postponed again this summer.
All the prerequisites for a tourism fiasco seemed to be in place, simply because of the record heat. We have just experienced the hottest June and July in living memory in Europe, the average temperature was 2.79 degrees Celsius above the reference value and reached a spectacular 21.62 degrees - making traveling actually torture. There were also gruesome records in the forest fires: near the Castilian city of Ávila, the largest fire in the history of Spain destroyed an area of 50,000 hectares and at times even threatened the suburbs of Madrid.
The number of large fires in Spain is already three times as high as in previous years, also because of the rainy spring, which allowed an exceptional amount of biomass to grow in the forests and became the ideal fire accelerator in the dry summer months. The situation in France was just as dramatic. The fire in the Gironde near Bordeaux was the largest in 75 years; 42,000 hectares of forest fell victim to it. Across Europe, 5,000 square kilometers of forest have burned since the beginning of the year, and no region seems safe from the plague. Fires even raged in Scandinavia, on Lake Garda and in the High Fens on the German-Belgian border.
Existential, dramatic and sometimes deadly
But it is also true that, with the exception of the southwestern French seaside resort of Arcachon and its surroundings, no holiday region was directly affected by the fires and tourist routine was hardly disrupted. Even in Spain, the vast majority of tourists were able to spend their holidays without any problems - for example on the Costa Brava, even though the hinterland near La Bisbal d'Empordà was ablaze. But the bathers in Lloret de Mar, Empuriabrava or Roses didn't notice any of this. The fires were existential, dramatic and sometimes fatal for the locals, but not for the highly mobile species of tourists.
Even this year's political upheavals have had surprisingly little impact on summer travel. The pessimists were not right, the horror reports of the spring fizzled out, it was once again much ado about nothing: Trump and Netanyahu's Iran war with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz did not cause the kerosene to run dry, global air traffic did not come to a standstill, everyone who wanted to - and could still afford it - reached their holiday destination by plane. Even the central hubs in the Gulf region were able to recover surprisingly quickly from the shock of the complete closure.
Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha are already at almost 100 percent of their capacity again, Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways are reliably transporting their passengers to Asia and Oceania as before the crisis months - and even at the height of the war, global air traffic proved its resilience and found enough alternative routes for the flight routes over the Gulf. Then we went via Bangkok, Singapore, Seoul or Taipei to Bali and Phuket, Australia and New Zealand.
The great tourist migration north has also been postponed – if it ever takes place. Tour operators and holiday airlines are only registering a moderate, but not a tectonic, shift in travel flows from the Mediterranean to the North Sea or Baltic Sea. This is reflected in Denmark, for example, with an increase of two percent in visitor numbers in the first half of the year. However, the Scandinavian countries remain exotic destinations by mass tourism standards. They also wouldn't have the capacity to accommodate all the holidaymakers from Benidorm, Torremolinos or Rimini in their holiday homes and campsites.
Holidays in a down jacket and East Frisian mink
This means that one of the popular catchphrases of this hot summer remains an empty word, at least for mass and package tourism: “Coolcation”, vacation in pleasantly cool areas, is not a massive trend, but rather a marginal phenomenon. The travel portal lastminute.com even notes the opposite trend: bookings for Northern Europe on the platform have declined by 16 percent in the past three years, while holiday destinations that offer comparatively a lot for little money, such as Albania, Morocco and Tunisia, have increased significantly regardless of their temperatures.
When on vacation, people pay more attention to their wallets than to the thermometer; vacations in down jackets and East Frisian mink don't seem to be for everyone anyway. And when the Black Forest Tourism Association recently reported a 3.6 percent increase in the number of overnight stays by Spanish visitors, it gave the impression that Lake Titisee was the new Costa del Sol. The Black Forest is actually becoming more and more popular with Spaniards, but behind this increase there are fewer people than land at Palma de Mallorca airport in less than an hour during high season.
The Black Forest can also look forward to more and more domestic guests, but what is astonishing is that Germany as a whole has hardly benefited from this year's global crises. Not even Germans themselves in significant numbers consider taking a vacation in their own country as a precaution in the spell of Mediterranean heat waves and global political minefields - in the first half of the year, the number of overnight stays by domestic guests only rose by 0.3 percent and even fell by 3.6 percent in June. And the shrinking number of trips abroad, which fell by 8.3 percent in 2025 compared to the previous year, is primarily related to narrower vacation budgets in times of economic crisis.
The real beneficiaries of the booming tourism remain those countries that have been so in recent years - above all Spain, which has an affinity with the Black Forest, which will probably reach the mark of 100 million visitors per year in 2026 for the first time in its history. Neither 45 degrees in Seville nor major fires on the Costa del Azahar can stop the Spanish record hunt. And even a city like Barcelona, which is almost unbearable in the height of summer, was able to increase the number of passengers at its now seventh-largest airport in Europe by 2.9 percent this July compared to the same month last year.
However, in Spain there is a saturation of visitors from France and especially from Germany. The number of German holidaymakers, who are increasingly avoiding midsummer in favor of spring or autumn, is no longer increasing for the first time in many years, but has actually fallen by one percent in the first six months - a healthy stagnation in view of the images of desperate demonstrators protesting against the excesses of mass tourism in Barcelona or Palma de Mallorca. But that doesn't mean the Spaniards can take a breather, because other nations are happy to step into the breach, especially the Americans. Their number increased by ten percent from January to June, and now they can even fly non-stop from New York to Mallorca.
Psychology now knows terms such as climate fear and climate sadness. The sight of burning forests and withering landscapes upsets sensitive people and causes them to lose confidence in the future. In this context, we sometimes even talk about pre-traumatic stress: the mere possibility of suffering a trauma at some point worsens mental health. Fortunately, this is not yet a widespread disease; fortunately, travelers are smarter than we sometimes believe. He is not easily deterred, correctly assesses the dangers and sets off to see the world personally. Nothing better can happen to us in these hypermedia times of increasing hysteria. How much blame the tourist takes on themselves for the climate catastrophe through their actions is a completely different question.
