As Europe enters the full summer vacation season, a "coolcation" trend—taking holidays in the relatively cooler Nordic countries—is spreading. Southern Europe, long favored as a traditional vacation spot, has been hit by heat waves and wildfires driven by abnormal temperatures.
*According to a roundup of major foreign media, booking platforms, airlines, and travel agencies have said demand for cooler destinations has been rising recently. They said travel demand for Nordic countries such as Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, and Finland has increased sharply compared with before.
Online travel platform Trivago said bookings by Britons for Norway in July and August rose 55% from a year earlier, while bookings for Sweden and Denmark increased 57% and 29%, respectively. According to AFP, the French version of Hotels.com also recorded a 246% surge in searches for rooms in Copenhagen, Denmark, after France was hit by its first heat wave in May.
Ben Smith, chief executive officer (CEO) of Air France-KLM, said in an interview with the Financial Times (FT) on the 30th of last month that American travelers are generally sticking to their existing plans, but "the biggest shift in travel patterns is that Europeans are heading to the Nordic region this summer."
British low-cost carrier Jet2 also said that since launching its first route in 2024 from London to Bergen, Norway, capacity to the area has nearly tripled recently, and demand for Iceland routes is rising rapidly.
Europeans have long taken summer vacations along the Mediterranean coast, where the weather is mild and prices are relatively low. But as heat waves driven by abnormal temperatures have intensified in recent years, demand for trips to cooler regions has grown, and this summer—when the heat peaked—demand for the Nordics surged.
Southwestern European countries such as France and Spain suffered more than 10 days of heat waves with peak temperatures hovering above 40 degrees starting in early this month. Large wildfires sparked by the heat wave also broke out one after another in France and Spain, prompting declarations of national emergencies. Although the fires have stabilized and most emergency orders have been lifted, the damage in the southwest has made travel difficult.
Trivago CEO Johannes Thomas said, "Europe's summer travel map is not yet at the point of a complete overhaul, but its contours are definitely changing," noting that as abnormal temperatures from global warming become the norm rather than the exception, cooler destinations will continue to gain popularity.
However, the prevailing view is that demand for Southern Europe—where prices are low and travel infrastructure is well developed—remains solid. Lighthouse, which tracks demand for hotels and flights, said searches for Nordic and alpine resorts spiked recently due to the heat wave, but actual bookings in July and August were still mostly for sunny Southern European resorts such as the Algarve in Portugal.
Jim Eastwood, the U.K. CEO of the travel agency Travel Counsellors, said, "It's true the recent heat wave has sparked more conversations about destinations, but it's not as simple as swapping Spain for Scandinavia," adding, "For most customers, the destination they've long looked forward to still comes first."