Whether inspired by Beyoncé’s latest studio album, Taylor Swift or the final season of the Paramount (PARA) show Yellowstone, the current spike in interest around all things Old West and cowboy culture is seeping into the travel space.
Travel booking platform Skyscanner reported that 44% of the U.S. travelers it polled for its annual Travel Trends report were interested in “cowboy core,” while outlets such as National Geographic and Southern Living have identified what is also sometimes referred to as “frontier tourism” as a trend for the year ahead.
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Line dancing, rodeos and tracking the frontier trail: a perfect cowgirl holiday
The exact type of cowboy or cowgirl vacation will differ by location and activity. Travelers polled by Skyscanner identified ranch visits, line dancing, sleeping under the stars, and horseback riding as the activities that travelers planning frontier trips are most interested in.
Meanwhile, cities that host “stampedes”—multi-day rodeo/festival events—such as Cody, Wyoming, Calgary, Canada, and Yellowstone National Park are seeing the largest spikes in visitors.
“Interest in all things cowboy, cowgirl and country aesthetic have risen dramatically, as fans flock to be part of the trend’s latest incarnations,” the authors behind the Skyscanner report write. “This love of the Wild West and ranch life is manifesting itself in cowboy- and cowgirl-adjacent trips and vacations themed around country music.”
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States such as Texas, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Oklahoma have for years attracted tourists interested in both real frontier history and certain types of activities re-created for tourists. Despite a dip in tourist numbers observed from a peak over the last decade, Delta Air Lines (DAL) has announced five new routes to Austin that it will start running in 2025, while Frontier Airlines (FRON) has just committed to a spate of new flights from Denver, Houston and Dallas among others.
Looking for international country music destinations? There are even more options
Travel platform Booking.com (BKNG) has also identified a spike in flyer numbers to Nashville and Austin in the United States and also Tamworth in Australia and Donegal County in Ireland — both places have a long history of country music.
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“Northeast of Australia’s New South Wales lies the city of Tamworth, also known as the nation’s country music mecca,” Booking writes of Australia’s country capital. “Although the annual Tamworth Country Music festival is held each January, visitors are welcome to discover such landmark sites as the Big Golden Guitar, which is an homage to this destination’s contribution to the aforementioned genre.”
As a term, “frontier tourism” has also been used to describe any type of holiday in which a person plans a trip around certain sport or adventure activities in remote destinations — in some cases, as farflung as Fiji, Mongolia and Kazakhstan.
“From the deepest depths of the seas across the polar regions to the highest mountains and into outer space, if a place exists, it is now fair game for tourism,” write the authors of the Lemongrass Marketing Travel Trends Report 2025. “Frontier tourism, however, is prohibitively expensive for most people.”
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