Lore Tripping Is Just Heritage Tourism With a Trendy New Name
This month, travel media discovered something it's calling "lore tripping": trips to towns "with colorful backstories rather than major cities and well-known hotspots."
Airbnb's latest data found that nearly half of Gen Z's trending fall destinations this year are small towns, not major cities, with searches up 30% for a place like Hot Springs, Arkansas and 15% for Helen, Georgia.
A separate Airbnb figure puts it in broader terms: 90% of Gen Z travelers say they're drawn to small towns and quirky under-the-radar destinations.
Anyone who has worked in heritage tourism for longer than a season could tell you why. Those small towns aren't just winning on price, they're also winning on authenticity: the "colorful backstories" and local history only makes sense when you are standing in the actual place. Airbnb gave the behavior a catchy name for a headline. But at its heart, lore-tripping is one expression of heritage tourism — a field that has been turning place-based stories into reasons to travel for decades.
Stories connected at scale
The underlying appeal is already visible in heritage tourism experiences that connect distinctive stories to the places where they happened. Civil War Trails connects more than 1,500 documented sites across six states into a single system, so a traveler can follow a battlefield or a farmhouse to the next stop instead of reading about it in a book. I've written before about one piece of that same network closer to my home: the John Wilkes Booth escape route, a 66-mile drive through southern Maryland tracing the twelve days Booth spent on the run after Ford's Theatre, past Mary Surratt's rooming house, the Mudd House where his broken leg was set, and the old Port Tobacco courthouse. The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway works the same way: 223 miles and 45 sites across Maryland's Eastern Shore and Delaware, tracing one woman's actual route rather than telling her story from a single marker.
That kind of network fits how Gen Z is already choosing to get around. Research in Georgia from earlier this year shows 80% of Gen Z travelers planned to skip flights entirely this summer in favor of road trips. A network like Civil War Trails or the Tubman Byway turns that story into a reason to drive, stop, and spend money in several towns instead of just one.
The story is the differentiator
A good story doesn’t always require a regional network to drive tourism, however.
Lewistown, Pennsylvania has spent more than two hundred years telling one story: eat goose on September 29 and you won't want for money all year. The Juniata River Valley has built a five-day Goose Day festival around that single superstition, which was brought over by an English settler in the late 1700s.
New Bern, North Carolina does something similar with a much sweeter legend: Pepsi-Cola was invented there in 1898 by a local pharmacist, Caleb Bradham, and the original store on Middle Street still sells Pepsi from the counter for about a quarter.
And you don't necessarily need to build around history. Baltimore's Ghost Rivers project turns a stream buried under the Remington neighborhood into a self-guided urban hike. Ellicott City's Koreatown, official since 2021, turns a stretch of Route 40 into a food-driven itinerary. Carroll County's barn quilt trail turns painted barns into a driving loop through three small towns. Infrastructure, food, and folk art: three different starting points, and every one works because it's specific to that one place.
Whatever story your destination can tell that no other place can -- that is your tourism differentiator.
Why this is a heritage tourism project, not a marketing one
Every example above starts with raw material that already existed: a battlefield, a cultural tradition, a legend one settler or one pharmacist happened to bring to town. What separates the ones that became a trip from the ones still sitting in an archive are partners willing to connect them: a heritage area, byway, library, or museum to do the research and tie the geography together and a DMO or destination marketer to put it in front of travelers.
Finding your story
None of this is a new demand. The travelers behind these numbers are asking for experiences specific to place, something they can't experience anywhere else.
The real work is figuring out what that specific, unrepeatable something already is in your own community, and making it easy enough to find that a visitor can actually plan a trip around it. Sometimes that story is obvious, but more often it's scattered across a historical society's files, a few local memories, and a museum exhibit, waiting for someone to pull it together into a route or a trip.
I help my clients tackle this: sitting down with a community, figuring out which story is actually theirs to tell, and building the plan that turns it into something a visitor can find and follow. If you're looking at your own region and wondering what your version of Goose Day or the Ghost Rivers hike might be, I'd love to help you find it. Happy to jump on a call if that'd be useful, or just tell me what you think your story already is.
