Three key factors will make traveling internationally more common in the next 10 years: a growing middle class around the world, technological advances that will make air travel easier and less expensive and an aging global population, says Visa’s chief economist Wayne Best.
According to Visa’s new travel and tourism study, conducted with Oxford Economics, the number of households worldwide traveling outside of their home country is estimated to increase to more than 280 million households by 2025—up 35 percent from 2015.
“What will emerge is an expanding ‘traveling class,” said Best, ”that will spend a growing portion of their household income on cross-border travel. Tomorrow’s traveling class will likely be much older and hail from the emerging markets—looking very different from a typical international traveler of today.”
The study also contends that spending for a trip in progress (which excludes costs made prior to a trip, such as airline tickets), will reach an average of $5,305 a year by 2025.
Learn more about the study, including the top 10 countries estimated to spend the most on global travel in 2025 and an interactive map that explores key travel trends, in the Mapping the Future of Global Travel and Tourism paper on the Visa VPS website.