Are self-guided experiences just a trend, or are they becoming a new and deep layer of travel?

I’m the co-founder of UCPlaces, a platform that started from a simple observation: people love discovering places, but many travelers today want far more flexibility than traditional tours usually offer.

The Quiet Travel Revolution:
Why Self-Guided Experiences Are Suddenly Everywhere

After many conversations with travelers, guides, and tourism professionals, we realized there was a gap somewhere between guidebooks, blogs, and organized tours. People wanted stories, context, and local insight, but with the freedom to explore at their own pace, choose what interests them most, and change plans along the way.

That led us to build UCPlaces (ucplaces.com): self-guided audio experiences that play automatically as you walk through a city or drive through a destination, turning places into interactive stories. While building it, we also started noticing a much bigger shift happening across the travel world.

Talk to enough people across travel meetups and forums, and you can spot a new pattern.
Yes, travel seems to be booming, but some of the most interesting innovation right now isn’t in flights, hotels, or even booking platforms. It’s in experiences. More specifically - flexible experiences that travelers can unlock instantly.

Modern travelers don’t experience cities the same way they did ten years ago. Discovery happens on maps, TikTok, newsletters, and niche travel communities. Plans are fluid. People wander more, search more, and decide on the spot.

A shift is occurring, this is because traditional tours don’t always fit that behavior. Self-guided experiences, however, do. They sit naturally inside the way people already travel: open your phone, press start, and suddenly the city begins to explain itself. No schedule, no group coordination, no pressure to keep up.

That’s why this category has been quietly accelerating.

Another force pushing it forward is the creator economy. Local historians, guides, travel writers, and niche experts are realizing they can turn their knowledge into location-based products instead of one-time tours.

In many ways, destinations are becoming interactive media.

Platforms like UCPlaces are built around that shift. Instead of static travel content, they enable GPS-triggered storytelling that unfolds as you move through a place.

There is a value triangle that is supporting this behavioral shift, consisting of three main stake holders:

1. Travelers. For most travelers, it feels natural. Which travelers? This might surprise you. Ages seem to be irrelevant. We are seeing adoption in ages 60 and 70+ almost as much as the younger generation.

2. Creators. For creators it scales.

3. The travel industry. It unlocks something that’s been difficult to deliver for decades: high-quality experiences without the operational overhead of physical tours.

👉 Which raises an interesting question for the travel community:

Are self-guided experiences just a trend… or are they quickly becoming a new and deep layer of travel?