Beach resorts have dominated honeymoon planning for as long as the honeymoon has existed as a tradition, but the newest booking data shows couples stampeding toward something entirely different. According to Fora’s 2026 Wedding & Honeymoon Trend Report, which compared the travel agency’s own booking data from March 2025 through February 2026 against the prior year, honeymoon bookings to Kenya jumped 295% and bookings to Tanzania rose 287%. Seychelles bookings climbed 150%, South Africa rose 112%, and safari-adjacent Sri Lanka, known for leopard sightings in Yala National Park, grew 170%. Nine in ten Fora advisors say their clients are willing to stretch their budgets specifically for this one trip.
Why Safari Suddenly Beat the Beach
The classic honeymoon pairing hasn’t disappeared so much as gotten more ambitious. Fora’s report notes that the traditional combination model, Kenya paired with Seychelles, or Tanzania paired with Zanzibar, remains the dominant booking pattern, meaning couples aren’t necessarily choosing safari instead of a beach finish; they’re adding a safari leg onto a trip that used to be beach-only. That shift reflects a broader appetite among newlyweds for honeymoons built around a genuine, once-in-a-lifetime experience rather than pure relaxation, and a safari, with its built-in sense of adventure, wildlife, and physical distance from ordinary life, delivers that in a way a resort pool simply can’t replicate.
Couples Are Spending More and Splitting the Trip Up
The spending data backs up how seriously couples are treating this decision. Fora found that 64% of clients now spend $10,000 or more on their honeymoon, and 15% spend $20,000 or more, figures that put a safari’s higher price tag well within reach of a growing share of newlyweds. At the same time, the report documents a shift toward phased honeymoon planning, with 59% of couples now opting for a short trip immediately after the wedding followed by a longer, delayed honeymoon later on. One in ten advisors also reported a rise in “pre-moons,” trips taken before the wedding itself, and even “elope-moons” that combine an elopement with the honeymoon into a single trip. Splitting the experience this way appears to make a bigger, more expensive trip like an African safari more financially and logistically manageable for couples juggling work schedules and wedding budgets at the same time.
Safari Isn’t the Only Category Surging
Safari destinations weren’t the only booking category to spike in Fora’s data. Greek islands like Naxos and Paros saw overall bookings rise 450%, with October travel to the islands specifically up 400%, and fall travel to Japan between October and December climbed 178%. The Italian Dolomites rose 173% overall, with May travel up a striking 800%. Off-peak timing shows up as a consistent thread across nearly all of these destinations, with 64% of advisors reporting that clients are actively choosing shoulder-season travel to stretch their honeymoon budgets further, a strategy that likely plays a role in safari’s rise too, since dry-season game viewing windows in East Africa don’t always line up with peak beach season elsewhere.
Africa’s Tourism Boom Isn’t Limited to Honeymooners
The safari surge among newlyweds is riding a broader wave across the entire continent. Tourism to Africa rose 8% in 2025 to roughly 81 million visitors, according to UN Tourism’s World Tourism Barometer, outpacing every other world region tracked in the report. Europe still drew far more total visitors, nearly 800 million, but grew at a comparatively modest 4%, while Asia and the Pacific grew 6% and North America actually saw arrivals fall 1.4%. Against that backdrop, a near-tripling of honeymoon bookings to Kenya looks less like an isolated fad among newlyweds and more like one visible slice of a continent-wide travel boom that’s pulling in leisure travelers of every kind, not just couples planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip.
What the Shift Says About Modern Honeymoons
Put together, the data describes a honeymoon market that has stopped treating “relaxing” and “unforgettable” as the same goal. Couples spending five figures on a single trip increasingly want a story to tell, not just a tan, and a jeep full of newlyweds watching a pride of lions at sunrise makes a very different kind of memory than a week of the same beach chair. Beach resorts aren’t going away, and the classic pairings prove couples still want both. But when a single destination category posts a 295% jump in a single year, it stops looking like a niche travel trend and starts looking like where honeymoon planning is actually headed next.
