Is group travel a growing trend?

Yes. Multigenerational and family trips reached 47% of travelers in 2025, up 17% year over year, with multigen bookings growing about 35% a year — and quality time was the number-one reason people gave for going, cited by 89% of Millennial and Gen Z parents.

Is solo travel dying?

No — it's booming. The U.S. solo-travel market was worth about $94.9 billion in 2024 and is growing ~12% a year, and 'solo travel' searches hit record highs in 2025. The case for the group trip isn't that solo dies; it's that togetherness travel is surging right alongside it.

Why do friend group trips fall apart?

Not for lack of desire. A friend trip is the only kind of group trip with no built-in organizer and no built-in occasion, so it collapses under coordination — dates, budgets, and commitment scattered across seven heads and one group chat.

Is it better to travel alone or with friends?

Both have value. Solo travel builds autonomy; traveling with people who know you leans on the close relationships that decades of research (the Harvard Study of Adult Development) name as the strongest predictor of long-term happiness and health — and shared experiences bond people and reduce loneliness.

How can travel help with loneliness?

Shared experiences measurably reduce loneliness and build connection, and strong social ties raise the odds of survival by about 50% (Holt-Lunstad meta-analysis). A recurring group trip is a fixed calendar ritual that keeps friendships from quietly drifting apart.

Why Group Travel Is the Next Big Travel Trend (2025–2030)

Group trips are hard...we've all been on both sides of the Venmo request; and the state of group trips has literally pushed most of us toward solo travel — not because going alone called to our souls, but because assembling the crew kept collapsing under its own logistics.

The shared spreadsheet with infinite tabs. The poll with nine "available" dates that somehow narrow down to zero. The year of lead time that still ends with someone bailing the week before. We've fronted a five-figure deposit to hold a house and then spent three months moonlighting as an unlicensed debt collector. We've also been the friend who owed $400 after the fact and got mysteriously bad at answering texts.

mariana ramalho dupe

It seems like with all the stress and BS around group trips, they would never make a comeback...but WeGoing! is betting against the solo travel only trend.

First, the honest part: solo travel is winning

We're not going to tell you solo travel is a fad. It isn't. The U.S. solo-travel market was worth about $94.9 billion in 2024 and is forecast to grow around 12% a year through 2030 (Grand View Research). Searches for "solo travel" jumped 72.6% in a single year and hit an all-time high in 2025 (Solo Traveler). Roughly 76% of Millennials and Gen Z say they're planning a solo trip (American Express, via Forbes). This is real, and a lot of it is genuinely good — autonomy, self-trust, going where you want without a committee.

If we stopped there, the headline would write itself: everyone's going alone, get used to it.

But look at what's happening in the same five years.

The paradox nobody's putting together

US Surgeon General Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation We have never been more equipped to travel alone, and never been lonelier doing it. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General issued a formal advisory on an "epidemic of loneliness and isolation," noting that a lack of connection can raise the risk of early death about as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and that roughly half of American adults report meaningful loneliness (U.S. Surgeon General). Nearly half of us have three or fewer close friends.

Put those two data sets on the same table and the tidy "solo travel is the future" story starts to wobble. A boom in going alone, sitting directly on top of a national emergency about being alone. That's not a trend. That's a symptom.

The tell is hiding in the group-travel numbers

Here's where it gets interesting. Togetherness travel is surging — just not evenly. 47% of travelers chose a multigenerational or family trip in 2025, up 17% year over year, and multigen bookings have grown roughly 35% a year (Squaremouth; Collette). The number-one reason people gave for hauling the whole family along? Quality time — cited by 89% of Millennial and Gen Z parents.

And friend trips? Still huge at 20% of travelers — the second most common trip type — but down about 3% (Squaremouth).

We want to sit with that dip, because it might be the most important number in this whole piece. Friend-group travel isn't shrinking because people stopped wanting it. It's shrinking because a friend trip is the only kind of group trip with no built-in organizer and no built-in occasion. A family reunion has a matriarch and a holiday. A friend trip has a group chat and a prayer. When "quality time" is the single thing travelers say they want most, and the friend version is the one quietly slipping, the bottleneck isn't desire. It's friction.

That's the whole thesis, and the data backs the unglamorous version of it: the appetite for togetherness is climbing, and the friend trip is the piece getting strangled by logistics.

And to be clear, it isn't that friend groups won't spend. When a group trip has a reason to exist, we spend like it matters: the average bachelor or bachelorette party now runs over $1,000 a head — closer to $1,200 once you add airfare and lodging (The Knot). A domestic golf-buddies trip averages around $1,500 per person, and $900–$2,500 for a long weekend (Golf.com). The average American family spent roughly $8,052 on travel in 2024, up about 20% in a single year (Condor Ferries). The willingness is obviously there. What all of those trips share is a built-in organizer and an occasion — a maid of honor, a golf captain, a family matriarch. Strip that away, and the same crew that would happily drop four figures somehow can't get a plain friend trip out of the group chat.

Most of the world already figured this out

None of this would be a revelation across much of the planet. In Caribbean, African, Latino, and many Asian and European traditions, life is organized around the group by default — you don't schedule community, you're simply in it. The U.S. is the outlier, routinely ranking among the most individualist cultures on earth, and we've exported "independence" so enthusiastically that it started to look a lot like "alone."

Family Cousins Group Travel Culture

There's something worth reclaiming there. A group trip isn't only a vacation; for a lot of people it's how you reinforce your roots — how you get the cousins to the island your family is actually from, how a culture gets handed down instead of just described. "Go alone to find yourself" is a very Western sentence. Much of the world would gently ask: find yourself with whom?

Solo vs. together isn't the fight the internet thinks it is

The pitch for solo travel is self-discovery, and fair enough. But if everyone's off discovering themselves separately, we have to ask the slightly rude question: are we all just Eat-Pray-Loving in parallel, quietly hoping to bump into each other in the same Tuscan cooking class? Who actually helps you learn the most about yourself — a stranger you'll never see again, or the people who've known you for fifteen years and keep choosing to grow alongside you?

The research here is not subtle. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, running for more than 80 years, keeps landing on the same finding: the quality of your close relationships is the single strongest predictor of long-term happiness and health — a better predictor of your physical health at 50 than your cholesterol (Harvard Gazette). A landmark meta-analysis of 148 studies and more than 300,000 people found that strong social ties raise your odds of survival by about 50% — on par with quitting smoking (Holt-Lunstad et al.).

And on how we bond, decades of work on experiences versus possessions finds that shared experiences create a kinship that shared stuff never does, and that spending on experiences with other people measurably chips away at loneliness (Scientific American).

Translated: a solo trip can teach you who you are. A trip with your people reminds you who you are to someone. Both are worth doing. Only one of them is quietly load-bearing for your health.

The real thing in the way: self-manufactured loneliness

Here's the belief underneath all of it. Friendships rarely end in a fight. They end in a slow drift, where money and work and family and "plans" keep winning, and nobody wants to be the one who asks — because asking feels needy and being asked feels like an obligation. So we all politely opt out of each other and call the result "just how it is in your thirties."

That's self-manufactured loneliness: we build the wall one reasonable excuse at a time, then feel sad about the wall.

Solo Travel Trying to Find Your Group

The group trip is one of the few adult rituals with enough gravity to knock it down — a fixed point on the calendar that says we're still doing this. But only if it actually happens. And right now the thing standing between a friend group and its trip isn't desire, or even money. It's coordination: the dates, the budget, and the commitment, all living in seven different heads and one doomed thread.

So — will the group trip really be the trend? Our honest bet.

We're not going to claim solo travel dies. It won't; the numbers are too strong and the freedom is real. Our claim is narrower and, we think, sturdier: the group trip is the trend the next five years are begging for, and friction — not desire — is the only thing holding it back. Every arrow points the same direction: a loneliness emergency, a documented hunger for quality time, a species that bonds over shared experiences and literally lives longer for it. The demand is already here. It's just stuck in the logistics.

Which is the entire reason we exist. Put the dates, the money, and the commitment in one place so a "maybe" can become a real yes — and the trip survives contact with real life. Nobody fronts $10k alone. Nobody becomes the group's debt collector. Nobody has to get weird about a $400 Venmo. The friend who desperately wants in but is scared of the planning gets to just… come.

Solo travel taught a generation they could go anywhere. The group trip is how they get to bring someone. When enough friend groups realize the only missing piece was the coordination, "me going" quietly becomes "we going."

We'll check back in five years and tell you honestly whether we were right. But we like our odds — and, full disclosure, we are wildly biased, because this is our entire company.

Me Going vs. WeGoing! Why Group Trips will Trend Over the Next Five Years