Breaks For The Burnt Out — Indians Are Now Travelling More, But For Lesser Time

There was a time when holidays and vacations came with pressure. One big annual trip. Carefully hoarded leave days. A mental checklist of 'must-see' places because who knew when the next break would come. In 2025, that logic has quietly fallen apart.

Travel fintech firm Scapia’s 2025 Travel Insights show that instead of waiting all year for one long escape, Indians are travelling in smaller, more frequent bursts — long weekends, midweek breaks, 48–72 hour detours stitched around work and life.

In 2025, flight bookings on the platform grew 5x, stays rose 8–9x, and travellers spent across 113 currencies in 174 countries, signalling not fewer travel ambitions, but more frequent ones.

"Travel in India has shifted from being occasional to habitual," said Anil Goteti, Founder and CEO of Scapia. "People are no longer waiting for one big holiday; they are weaving multiple, shorter trips into their year, increasingly anchored around experiences that matter to them."

The once-a-year vacation is being replaced by something lighter, repeatable, and easier to fit into modern schedules.

The defining feature of the micro-vacation isn’t distance, but frequency. Travellers are mixing flights, trains, buses and stays to create flexible itineraries that work around long weekends and hybrid work policies. Gen Z, in particular, is driving this shift.

They accounted for 33% of all train bookings and 40% of solo female bus bookings in 2025 — a sign that short-haul connectivity are enabling easier access beyond major airport hubs.

Destinations reflect this new logic. Domestically, places like Ziro, Pakyong, Jagdalpur and Pasighat are drawing travellers not because they promise exhaustive sightseeing, but because they reward short stays.

Internationally, Indian travellers are heading to less obvious cities such as Tashkent, Luang Prabang and Barbados, often anchored around a single experience rather than packed itineraries

Micro-vacations work because work itself has changed. Hybrid schedules and flexible leave policies allow travellers to step away without fully logging out — a call in the morning, emails cleared early, and the rest of the day reclaimed elsewhere.

Financial awareness has also increased drastically. Nearly 50% of train bookings and 60% of bus bookings on Scapia in 2025 were fully funded through reward redemptions.

International bookings by women tripled in 2025, with Tier-2 cities driving over 2.5x growth, signalling that travel is no longer limited to metro professionals, or ones with generous leave balances.

Looking ahead, Scapia expects three or more trips a year to become the norm, with destinations chosen for calendar-fit rather than popularity. The micro-vacation, it seems, isn’t a compromise, but a break for the burnt out.