The first thing vacation data tells you is what the word “domestic” hides. In France, domestic tourism is not a fallback category. It is a whole infrastructure: beaches, mountains, countryside, campsites, family houses, second homes, autoroutes, school holidays and inherited territories. INSEE’s travel tables show that French residents still make far more personal trips inside France than abroad, while Eurostat shows that France has one of Europe’s strongest domestic-only profiles.

But the same statistic describes opposite lives. For affluent households, staying in France can be a lifestyle choice: a second home, a ski week, a high-end Atlantic rental, a remote-work summer. For middle-class households, it is often optimization: car access, predictable costs, family-friendly logistics, campsites, relatives. For lower-income households, the issue may not be France vs abroad at all, but whether they leave. Eurostat reports that in 2024, 27% of Europeans could not afford one week of annual holiday away from home. The holiday divide begins before destination choice.

The comparison with other countries shows that vacation culture is built from geography. France domesticates the holiday because the country contains much of what its residents want from a holiday. Germany and the Netherlands are more outward-facing: Germany and Belgium both had 61% foreign-tourism participation in 2024, and the Netherlands 67%. Britain has a strong domestic tradition, but “staycation” often sounds like a crisis word: rediscovery mixed with cost-of-living pressure, airport stress and weak purchasing power. The US and China are different again: domestic travel can mean continental-scale movement. In Japan, the holiday is often shorter, seasonal and ritualized — onsen, rail, food, cherry blossoms, autumn leaves — while the country also hit a record 36.9 million foreign visitors in 2024.

The second thing vacation data now tells you is that tourism has become a housing story. France has passed one million Airbnb listings, making it Airbnb’s second-largest market after the US; Le Monde reports 268 million short-term-rental overnight stays in 2024, up 72% from 2019. The platform grew partly because France had the perfect base layer: second homes, domestic tourism, underused rural housing and a tax environment that made conversion attractive. Spain is the warning version of the same story. It welcomed a record 94 million international tourists in 2024 and generated around €126 billion in tourism revenue. But the political conversation around Spanish tourism is now less about attracting visitors than about housing, crowding, short-term rentals and local displacement. The same coast that serves domestic holidays becomes a global asset class.

The new luxury is therefore not distance. It is control. The privileged traveller can avoid August, absorb higher prices, use a second home, switch from the Mediterranean to the mountains during heatwaves, extend a stay through remote work, or book off-season. The constrained traveller faces peak-season prices, fuel costs, crowded trains, limited leave, childcare constraints and fewer fallback options. Tourism is back. But the holiday has become one of the clearest mirrors of modern inequality: some people can truly leave; others are simply sold “staying close” as a lifestyle.