One must admire the neatness of it all. In a world that often feels like a poorly rehearsed farce, the notion that our future desires can be so tidily quantified, packaged, and presented as a fait accompli offers a peculiar comfort. The latest dispatch from the oracles of Expedia informs us, with the serene authority of a meteorologist predicting rain, that the ‘hottest’ destination for 2026 will be Montana’s Big Sky. Searches, we are told, have surged by a clinically significant 92%. Not 91, not a messy 93, but a round, decisive number that brooks no argument. The wilderness, it seems, has been booked.
The report, a document of our times, reads less like a travel brochure and more like a behavioural audit. Big Sky, a place whose very name suggests an infinity too vast for human comprehension, is now rendered in the binary logic of clicks and conversions. Its appeal is dissected with corporate precision: skiing, hiking, cultural events, family-friendly offerings. One can almost see the spreadsheet, each majestic pine and powdery slope assigned a cell, its ROI calculated against the backdrop of the Absaroka Mountains. It is the sublime, processed through a server farm.
This is not to disparage Big Sky itself, which is, by all accounts, spectacular. Its raw, rugged beauty is beyond question. But its coronation as the ‘hottest’ spot for a year still two winters away speaks to a deeper, more pervasive modern anxiety: the fear of missing out, now outsourced to predictive analytics. We are no longer discovering places; we are being pre-emptively herded towards them by the ghost in the machine. The romance of the serendipitous find—the tucked-away trattoria in Sardinia, the unmarked path in Okinawa, the other two ‘trending’ locales on Expedia’s list—is being systematically replaced by the assurance of the algorithmically-approved experience. One wonders if the silence of the Montana night will be punctuated not by the howl of a wolf, but by the synchronized shutter-click of a thousand smartphones, all arriving because the same data stream told them to.
This phenomenon is not uniquely American, of course. It is a global affliction, a digital jet lag of the soul. Consider the recent, tragicomic scenes in Venice, where the authorities, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of visitors forecasted and facilitated by a million online itineraries, have instituted a reservation system and a fee for day-trippers. The city, a masterpiece of human ingenuity, has become a managed attraction, its fate dictated not by the Doge, but by search-engine trends and cruise-ship schedules. Or observe the ‘Instagrammable’ towns of Hallstatt or Chefchaouen, their authentic character slowly dissolving under the relentless gaze of the global tourist gaze, their existence validated only by their virality. We flock to places that promise us not an escape from the modern world, but a photogenic confirmation of our presence within its most approved corners.
There is a melancholic clarity in observing this. We are caught in a beautiful, terrible loop. We crave authenticity, solitude, connection with nature—sentiments Expedia’s report has dutifully identified and commodified. So we pursue these virtues en masse, in destinations pre-selected for their capacity to provide them, thereby inevitably eroding the very qualities we sought. The trail becomes a queue. The vista, a backdrop for a profile picture. The local festival, a performance for an audience of outsiders. We are both the eager participants in this pageant and, if we pause to look, profoundly outside of it, watching ourselves act out the rituals of leisure with a script written by unseen forces.
The irony, of course, is as crisp as the Montana air. In our desperate, search-driven quest for wide-open spaces and untamed beauty, we conspire to tame them with our attention. Big Sky’s impending ‘hotness’ is less a celebration of its attributes and more a referendum on our own impoverished imagination, our willingness to let a percentage surge stand in for a genuine yearning. Sardinia’s crystalline waters and Okinawa’s rich history are not far behind, their trending status a premonition of the crowds to come.
Perhaps, then, the most radical act for the 2026 traveller would be an act of quiet defiance. To look at that list, acknowledge its chilling accuracy, and then deliberately look away. To seek not the hotspot, but the quiet corner; not the trending peak, but the unremarkable hill. The true wilderness may no longer be a place on a map, but a state of mind—one that chooses disconnection over direction, and finds its own path through the noise. The algorithm, for all its surgical precision, cannot yet quantify the value of being lost. And that, in this meticulously curated world, may be the last great adventure.
