When you plan a trip on MonkeyTravel, one of the first things you do is pick the trip's mood — the interests that should shape the itinerary. Culture or nightlife, food or nature, adventure or relaxation. Most people pick around five.
Those choices are a quiet kind of honesty. Nobody performs for a planning tool the way they perform on Instagram — you pick what you actually want your days to contain. So we aggregated the mood selections from 261 real trips planned in summer 2026, and the result is a portrait of what travel is for right now.
It's not the portrait the marketing suggests.
The Ranking
Share of trips that selected each mood:
- Culture — 74%
- Art — 68%
- Photography — 66%
- Food — 57%
- Adventure — 56%
- Nature — 56%
- History — 56%
- Nightlife — 33%
- Shopping — 32%
- Relaxation — 22%
The average trip carries about five moods — nobody travels for just one thing.
The Relaxation Paradox
Look at the bottom of that list. Relaxation — the word on every resort brochure and half of all out-of-office replies — was picked by barely one trip in five.
We don't think travelers are lying on the beach less. We think "relaxing" is how people describe a trip afterward, not what they build it around. When someone sits down with real dates and a real destination, what they actually plan for is stimulation: things to see, eat, photograph, and learn. Rest is the byproduct of a good trip, not its architecture.
There's a practical lesson in that. If you plan a trip around relaxation — no anchors, no reservations, "we'll see" — you usually get boredom with better weather. The trips that end up feeling restful are the ones with a light but real structure: one thing worth doing each day and space around it.
Culture Is the Default Setting
Three of the top four moods — culture, art, photography — describe the same traveler: someone who wants to witness a place, not consume it. That squares with what we see in where people are going: Tokyo and Kyoto keep winning precisely because they reward attention. The camera stat is worth pausing on — two-thirds of trips now list photography as a planning priority, which means the itinerary question isn't just "what do we do?" but "what will we want to remember seeing?"
Food, at 57%, is the strongest single-interest signal in the data — and it's even stronger when you look at what actually ends up inside the itineraries, where food stops are a third of everything planned. Nightlife, meanwhile, is a minority interest at 33% — the 2026 traveler is far more likely to plan around a market than a club.
What This Means for Your Next Trip
Pick your real moods, not your aspirational ones. The itinerary you'll actually enjoy comes from the interests you actually have. If you never visit museums at home, three museums in Rome won't fix that.
Combine, don't choose. The data says the normal trip is culture + food + something outdoors. Destinations that do all three well — Rome, Bangkok, Barcelona, Tokyo — keep topping the planning charts for exactly that reason.
Don't schedule relaxation. Protect it. Leave one morning in three unplanned. That's the version of rest that survives contact with a real trip.
If you want to see what an itinerary built around your moods looks like, build one free — pick your five and watch what changes.
Data: mood selections from 261 anonymized trips planned on MonkeyTravel, May–August 2026, aggregated. Percentages are the share of trips selecting each mood; trips average 5.3 moods. No individual trips or travelers are identifiable. Part of our Q3 2026 Travel Planning Report series.
