The travel industry must ensure it treats extreme heat seriously

The confluence of the Fifa World Cup (the first with “hydration” breaks) across many hot and humid venues and the UK’s third heatwave of the summer has focused minds on the reality of adapting to a hotter world, not least the implications for travel.

Fans attending World Cup games had to manage their own hydration amid varying – and sometimes conflicting – policies regarding the carrying of refillable water bottles across the venues. Back in the UK, the media has been full of DIY solutions to keep our homes cool.

When it comes to travel, there is much talk of actual and potential shifting patterns of demand in response to hotter destinations. Less has been said about how we as travellers experience heat, how personalised that is and how we respond (or not) to it. Understanding the complexities of heat – how it is experienced unequally within and across destinations and between travellers – is essential if travel providers are to continue to help customers stay safe and well on their hotter holidays.

Safer Tourism conducts two waves of consumer research each year focused on travel safety. We dig into travellers’ experience and their decision-making to understand how they think about, and act on, risk. 

When we asked travellers recently (April 2026) about their experience of heat-related illness we discovered that two in five respondents (40%) reported that they (or their travelling companion) had experienced sickness brought on by the heat when travelling, including heat exhaustion, dehydration, dizziness or even heat stroke. This rises to nearly three-quarters of those aged 18-24, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that this age group is the most likely to adapt their travel plans in future because of the heat. 

What’s more worrying are travellers at the other end of the age range, those who are more likely to have long-term health conditions exacerbated by the heat but the least likely to change their behaviour as a result, with 55% of our respondents aged over 65 saying they will make no changes to their future travel plans because of the heat.

The fact is that heat affects all of us differently. Our gender, any health conditions, our age and many other factors feed in to how we cope with and adapt to heat. The two key processes our bodies use to regulate our temperature – sweating and vasodilation (expansion of blood vessels) – vary enormously.

Older people and young children have less responsive thermoregulation processes, and heat affects anyone with a long-term condition such as diabetes, heart disease or depression differently. Medications cause the body to respond differently in the heat, and some medications designed to keep us healthy (for example, by ensuring our blood pressure doesn’t increase) can be particularly problematic in extreme heat as blood vessels dilate further, leading to a risk of fainting. And travel itineraries do not often provide for a period of heat acclimatisation, something that football teams, for example, would always account for when travelling in hotter places. 

Our analysis of anonymised safety incident data from Safer Tourism’s Pledge partners (a dataset of more than 11 million journeys across 17 travel brands in 2025) continues to suggest that gastric illness and falls in particular could be reduced by better heat management. Our partners are re-jigging itineraries, looking at the hidden risks of queueing, publicising toilet stops to encourage better customer hydration (no one wants to be caught short), and providing electrolytes to staff running physical activities to help keep everyone safe and well as we all heat up.

Heat presents challenges right across the travel industry – for product development, risk management and customer experience as well as for on-the-ground staff and suppliers. And that’s without saying anything about the threats posed by heat-related disasters (such as wildfires) and the challenges to local and tourism resources and infrastructure, natural beauty and food systems, among others, posed by climate change. 

If you didn’t think sustainability and safety in travel were connected, think again.