Welcome to the twentieth edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.
With a new year ahead of us, we find out about the rise of luxury train travel, “grocery shop tourism” and other travel trends for 2026. We see how safety on board can be surprisingly amusing with a Filipino soap opera-style inflight video, and go behind the scenes of Bridgerton, which inspired up to two million set-jetters to visit Bath last year.
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For your sense of the open road | The biggest travel trends of 2026
Something about the blank canvas of a new year inspires many of us to take to the open road. Perhaps it’s because travel is an outcome for its own sake, free from the lack or the striving that drives so many goals and resolutions.
In The Biggest Travel Trends of 2026, Condé Nast rounds up a handful of travel experts and editors who share how they see travel shifting in the year ahead. Thanks to a slew of new literary screen adaptations, “period drama set-jetting” is one of these trends. Film fans are expected to flock to picturesque British filming locations like Devon and the Yorkshire Dales to see where their favourite scenes from upcoming movies like Sense and Sensibility and Wuthering Heights were shot.
Then there are trends that are closer to my own heart, like “luxury train hopping.” Long railway journeys – albeit on very un-luxurious trains – were central to how I travelled in my twenties. Time moved differently then, and I ended up spending a full year zig-zagging across India, windows wide open to the dusty heat of the horizon. Those days-long train rides – across China, Mongolia, Spain, and India – still call to me.
Condé Nast reports:
“The new golden age of luxury rail travel keeps gaining momentum, with demand surging year over year for slow-cruising itineraries that go, well, off the beaten track. (…) La Dolce Vita Orient Express launched eight round-trip itineraries, all departing from Rome, in April 2025, with each lasting from one to four nights. But well-heeled travelers want more than a few nights of Gilded Age cosplay – increasingly, they’re stringing together multiple luxury rail journeys into romantic, multi-week trips spent hopping from one train to the next.”
There are other more ‘out of the box’ travel trends, too – like “grocery shop tourism,” which is a wonderful way of opening your eyes to the unusualness of the ordinary. Travelling to new parts of the world to discover our ancestry is gaining popularity, as are “Grandma/grandpa getaways.” Museums are also “ditching the glass” to create more engaging – and sometimes tactile – experiences for visitors.
? Find your own inspiration among the 18 trends in Condé Nast’s Biggest Travel Trends of 2026.
For your sense of humour | “What do you need to keep your love safe?”
When did you last watch an inflight safety video from start to finish? Philippine Airlines’ new onboard video had me amused for six whole minutes this week, when it began airing on international flights. And I wasn’t even watching it aboard a plane.
Melodramatic characters in lavish costumes whip through a Filipino soap opera-inspired narrative, replete with young love, conflict, hyperventilating parents (in oxygen masks), and a slow motion run down a church-cum-aeroplane aisle.
The airline has called it the world’s first “safety novela.” Filmed in scenic locations across the country like Boracay and Malcapuya Island, it’s as much a ‘destination marketing’ video as a safety briefing.
This isn’t the first airline with an inflight safety video that’s gone viral. Nor is putting a spotlight on film or TV locations new in this space. Air New Zealand began producing themed safety videos in 2009, collaborating with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to create hits like The Most Epic Safety Video Ever Made, starring Elijah Wood. In 2024, British Airways made a video inspired by the country’s famous period literature, followed closely by VisitBritain’s multimedia Starring GREAT Britain campaign, featuring iconic locations from Harry Potter, James Bond, and Bridget Jones – and quintessentially British bears like Paddington.
But homegrown ‘telenovelas’ have dominated local television in the Philippines for decades and – thanks to simple but compelling storytelling, quirky humour, and fantastic production quality – you actually want to watch this til the end. Who knows: even without a suite of blockbusters, the country may yet encourage ‘set-jetters’ to visit these striking Filipino locations for themselves.
? Watch the six-minute video, and other content like trailers and Shorts here. Get the background, including the thinking behind the project, in this article. I’d recommend watching the Behind the Scenes version of BA’s video, May We Haveth One’s Attention, which features wholesome interviews with the pilots, cabin crew, and baggage handling agents who play themselves in the film.
For your sense of location | Behind the scenes of Bridgerton in Bath
Breakfast at Tiffany’s fans have been travelling to New York City’s Fifth Avenue flagship store ever since the film debuted in the sixties. But since the term ‘set-jetting’ was coined in around 2007, film and TV lovers have been going further afield – and in far larger numbers – to lay eyes on the filming locations from their favourite shows and movies.
A few years after Netflix’s popular Regency-era romance drama, Bridgerton, was released in 2020, nearly a third of tourists travelling to Bath and the West of England are reportedly influenced by seeing the region on screen. That’s between 1.3 and 2 million set-jetters.
Amanda Armstrong’s VoiceMap of Bath captures some of the fun behind this relatively new flavour of travel – even if period dramas aren’t your thing.
In Bridgerton’s Filming Locations in Bath: An Audio Tour, she lets us in on some of the show’s necessary “trickery” – like the fact that Lady Danbury’s house is nowhere near the Primark store in Bath Street, from where the character Simon supposedly spies it.
We hear about Gunter’s Tea Shop, where one of the show’s best-known scenes – “you’ll no doubt remember the spoon-licking scene” – was filmed. History fans will delight in discovering that Gunter’s was, in fact, a real tea room in Regency London, and the supplier of Queen Victoria’s granddaughter’s bride cake.
Armstrong also points out amusing details like which modern doorbells were – and were not – successfully disguised during filming, in keeping with the period.
? Hear behind-the-scenes stories about Gunter’s Tea Shop here, and browse the whole tour, Bridgerton’s Filming Locations in Bath: An Audio Tour.
Until next time, thanks for travelling with us!
Best Wishes,
Claire van den Heever
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