Is the peaks period past its peak?

So, Boxing Day through to the end of February became a huge sales period for travel, particularly for the traditional summer holiday. Travel companies built marketing plans around it, increased budgets, launched offers and geared themselves up for some of their busiest weeks of the year. It was a huge deal.

And it still is, of course. Nobody sensible is suggesting travel brands down tools next January and see what happens. But 2026 has given us another pretty big hint that since Covid, the old pattern is changing. Bookings are becoming less concentrated, people are waiting longer and demand can disappear for a few weeks before coming back quickly and suddenly.

Peaks has already been getting flatter

We’ve been tracking travel search behaviour at Adido for years and the numbers from the start of 2026 were pretty telling.

My analysis of the peaks period found overall travel searches were down 1.2% year on year. That followed a much bigger 6.8% fall in 2025, leaving search volumes across the two months around 8% below where they were in 2024.

January searches in particular have been gradually declining over the past two years.

Then came the wider Q1 2026 travel search trends. Across our travel search dataset, volumes between January and March were down 13% year on year, the biggest quarterly decrease we’ve recorded in the past few years. Cruise continued to buck the trend, but package holidays, adventure holidays and searches for many individual countries were among the areas struggling.

There is an important caveat here because Google searches obviously aren’t bookings, and the two can get muddled remarkably quickly.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Some travel businesses had a cracking January. Hays Travel recorded its busiest trading day in history in January, while Not Just Travel went on to report its biggest peaks ever. So this isn’t an argument that peaks 2026 was a washout. I’d say the more interesting point is just how inconsistent the picture has become.

For example, ArrangeMY Escape’s Jen Lynch described January as ‘slower, quieter and harder to convert than expected’, despite the business doing more marketing than in previous years. Elsewhere, an AITO business confidence survey found that 32% of operators said January had been worse than the year before.

Peaks weak, lates…great?

As the year has gone on, much of the industry chatter moved away from the power of peaks and towards lates.

In April, Independent Travel Experts said 20% of its bookings were for travel that month. Dame Irene Hays, owner of Hays Travel, has also stated that the summer booking window had compressed from "well over seven months" down to "around sixteen weeks", with a noticeable increase in customers booking within two weeks of travel.

ABTA consumer research published in early July added to the picture, finding that 30% of people intending to travel that summer expected to book just two to four weeks ahead, while another 10% planned to leave it until less than a fortnight before departure.

Then we got into the main summer holiday period and the numbers became even harder to ignore. Almost half of Advantage Travel Partnership bookings during one week in July were lates, while The Travel Network Group said 52% of its bookings were for travel within the following nine weeks.

That is a lot of holidays being sold far later than many businesses would ideally like, and it creates one particularly stubborn commercial headache. Do you discount those holidays to get the booking over the line or hold your nerve?

There’s evidence that travellers may be learning to wait too. TTG’s Travel Outlook 2026 found that 48% of travel leaders believed customers were booking later because they expected to pick up a discount, while the same proportion thought consumers had come to expect lower prices.

And that’s where the lates problem can start feeding itself. If customers repeatedly see prices fall as departure gets closer, some will understandably decide there’s little incentive to book early. Operators then find themselves with more unsold inventory later in the cycle, which increases the pressure to discount again.

This doesn’t mean everyone booking late is sitting there waiting for a bargain, of course. Confidence, finances and sheer procrastination will all play their part. But if discounting is contributing to shorter booking windows, the industry needs to be careful it doesn’t accidentally train customers to wait.

That leaves travel businesses with a difficult balancing act. Protect price for too long and you risk carrying distressed inventory into the final weeks before departure. Discount too readily and you may make next year’s late-booking problem even worse.

So what does this mean for peaks 2027?

I don’t think the rise of lates spells the end of peaks. The dismal weather of January and February never fails to jumpstart people’s wanderlust and, for plenty of businesses, a lot of bookings.

A better description might be fragmented peaks.

Instead of relying on one enormous selling period at the beginning of the year, we could see smaller and less predictable spikes in demand spread across the full 12 months. Some might be driven by payday or school holidays, while others could follow a spell of bad UK weather, a change in prices or confidence returning after a period of uncertainty.

And it’s fair to say there’s been no shortage of uncertainty in 2026 so far.

TTG’s Travel Outlook 2026 noted that 76% of travel leaders surveyed said the impact of the Middle East conflict on consumer travel demand was a barrier to growth. At the time, 53% were behind or significantly behind their year-to-date booking expectations, yet 45% said late bookings were ahead of expectations.

That gives us a pretty good example of the problem. Demand wobbles, customers pause and then bookings start moving again, sometimes with very little warning. Travel marketers planning for 2027 need to brace themselves for much more of that.

1. Don’t assume you’ll get the bookings during peaks

Travel brands should absolutely keep marketing through January and February. Spend the money, run the campaigns and get in front of your audience while holidays are very much on their minds. What I would say though is just don’t assume all that interest will immediately appear in the booking numbers.

Someone might visit your website in January, compare a couple of holidays, bookmark a few over the following months and finally book in June. That doesn’t make the January marketing pointless, but it does suggest that judging its success solely on immediate bookings becomes increasingly problematic.

Look at what happens before the sale as well. Repeat visits, email engagement, enquiries and the products people keep coming back to can all tell you there’s interest there even if the booking hasn’t happened yet.

If booking journeys are getting longer, a weaker January sales figure may tell you less about the year ahead than it once did.

2. Be more consistent throughout the year

If people increasingly book when they feel ready, it becomes much harder to justify throwing a huge chunk of the annual marketing budget at a few weeks at the start of the year and expecting that period to deliver enough business to carry you through.

Keep using your customer database properly, maintain your email and CRM activity and make sure your paid media doesn’t simply drop away once February arrives. Give people useful reasons to return to your website and make sure they still remember you when they’re ready to book.

Your existing customer database becomes particularly valuable here. Someone who travelled with you two years ago may already be thinking about their next trip, while somebody who looked at Menorca in January and didn’t book could still be comparing options in May.

You don’t want to disappear from view simply because the traditional peaks window has closed.

3. Be much more reactive with marketing budgets

Travel demand can change bloody quickly and we’ve seen a lot of that in 2026. Consumer confidence fluctuates, certain destinations become harder to sell and travellers decide to play the waiting game. Then things settle and demand can return much faster than expected.

Your marketing budget needs to cope with both directions.

If PPC suddenly starts producing brilliant returns, can you increase spend quickly enough to make the most of it? If one destination takes a sudden hit, can you move money elsewhere rather than continuing to spend because that’s what the spreadsheet says you’re doing this month?

A budget agreed 12 months earlier shouldn’t become a straitjacket. Marketing teams need enough freedom to react when the market gives them a reason to, and those parameters are much easier to agree before the pressure is on.

4. Get better tracking and CRM in place

This becomes even more important if people spend weeks or months thinking about a holiday before finally booking.

Say somebody visits your website four times in a month and keeps looking at the same trip. That’s useful information, provided you can actually see the behaviour and have something sensible in place to respond to it.

Good tracking, first-party data and a properly connected CRM can help identify customers who are showing strong signs of interest without converting. Platforms such as HubSpot and Force24 can be used to build workflows around that behaviour when the underlying data is good enough.

Perhaps someone receives an email after repeatedly viewing a particular holiday. Maybe an availability update would be useful, or a reminder about flexible payment terms. In some cases, an incentive might be enough to get them over the line.

I’d be wary of automatically reaching for the discount button though, particularly if customers are already being trained to expect cheaper prices by waiting.

The useful bit is being able to base your communication on what somebody is actually doing, rather than sending everybody the same promotion because it happens to be the third week of January.

5. Prepare your business for volatility

This is probably the biggest one, and it goes well beyond marketing.

Finance teams need to forecast against changing booking patterns, commercial teams have inventory to manage and boards need to understand why bookings might be arriving later than expected. Marketing teams, meanwhile, may have to keep spending without necessarily seeing the immediate return they once expected from peaks.

That can get uncomfortable very quickly if everybody walks into January expecting the same booking curve they had 10 years ago. So start planting those seeds internally now. Use what we’ve seen in 2026 when you’re discussing 2027 targets and budgets.

Final thoughts

Peaks still has a big role to play and January 2027 may well be another strong month for plenty of travel brands. I just think we need to stop treating it as the point at which the year is won or lost.

Booking patterns are getting harder to call, which means 2027 could demand a little more patience and a lot more flexibility from travel businesses.

A slow January might sting, but 2026 has given us enough reason not to write off the year by the start of February.