The Top 12 Camping & Hiking Trends of 2025

Airbnb-style marketplaces for campgrounds connect campers with landowners

Millions of land owners are land rich but cash poor. By building a marketplace for land owners to rent out their land to campers, Hipcamp is bringing liquidity to the poor land owner demographic.

Hipcamp bootstrapped their marketplace by first building a web app for campers to find public campgrounds. They indexed camp site information and built up demand in the process.

But demand has been growing for campsites: Yosemite, for example, requires a reservation made at 8am sharp, 6 months in advance. As demand continued to grow, and supply stayed flat, users increasingly complained of insufficient campgrounds so Hipcamp turned to private land.

The biggest hurdle in getting private landowners onboard was overcoming their discomfort with the risks of hosting campers (damage to property, liability, etc.). Individual land owners aren’t likely to attempt to set up insurance coverage on their own: it requires learning and costs, but Hipcamp’s scale and infrastructure mean that it can use the insurance feature to open up massive amounts of land to eager campers.

This new form of liquidity is attractive to landowners, often with inherited land, many of whom are facing rising property taxes and stagnant earnings.

And as camping is becoming more popular, it’s also becoming more social, with millennials typically camping in the largest groups, helping fuel the fire for products like backpack coolers whose sales grew an average of 35% annually over the past 3 years.

The rise of glamping – glamorous camping – spurs demand for products that make camping more comfortable

Camping is having a renaissance. The ending of COVID restrictions and the popularity of festivals encouraged 58 million U.S. households to camp in the past year, generating an estimated revenue of almost $44 billion in 2023. Yet, outdoor brands are hungry for more.

To grow the market further, tent makers have only two choices: convince existing customers to upgrade, or persuade new campers to buy their first tent. It turns out that you can unlock both options with the right product innovation.

One of the biggest complaints about camping is having to set up your tent. Outdoor brands have taken note and created products to suit low-effort campers — such as inflatable tents. Supported by air rather than fiddly fiberglass poles, these shelters can be erected quickly using an electric pump.

Similarly, blackout tents allow campers to enjoy a lie-in or get some sleep on a brightly lit festival ground.

These products also tie in with the broad trend toward "glamping" and making outdoor activities more accessible. While some people enjoy battling with nature, most casual campers just want to relax and enjoy peaceful surroundings.

Fear of losing signal drives young campers to seek out new cell phone connectivity products

While smartphones have changed human behavior in many ways, one of the most striking is that the generation that grew up with smartphones has been able to almost entirely avoid the sensation of being lost; almost everywhere, they can get coverage and access maps.

The rise of smartphones and constant real-time updates has led to the rise of smartphone anxiety—the fear of being away from connectivity, even for a little while. But there are still places where phone coverage is spotty or doesn't exist at all, and products like Zoleo let people continue to send messages even when they're out of cell phone service range.

Zoleo is a small phone accessory that lets users send messages through WiFi, regular messaging and data plans, or through a global satellite network. Zoleo ends up competing with pure satellite phone companies because there’s a larger population that needs intermittent satellite phone access than always-on access. Satellite phone companies might prefer that Zoleo not exist, but the satellites themselves are expensive upfront and have low marginal costs, so every new use case is profitable.

As products like Uber and Domino’s delivery make real-time tracking more of an expectation than a bonus, friends and family increasingly want to keep close tabs on their relatives that venture into areas without coverage. Many reviews for Zoleo and competing products mention a spouse’s anxiety. When it comes to camping gear, the user and customer are often one and the same. But with products like Zoleo, many purchasers are concerned family members. As times shift, brands that sell products that solve for anxiety are increasingly targeting family members with their marketing.

Mountain biking and cycle touring collide: the rise of bikepacking

Interest in bikepacking is surging, fueled not only by a growing appetite for adventure travel, but also by state governments who see it as a boon for the small towns that cyclists pass through along the way.

The sport — a cross between cycle touring and mountain biking — tends to take riders through rural areas where tourism dollars are otherwise scarce, particularly outside of snowmobiling season. Cyclists go slower than snowmobilers and therefore often spend more time and money in towns, giving legislators an incentive to maintain and expand these trail networks for year-round access.

As they do so, they help boost the growing bikepacking industry, which includes not just specialty bike shops, but also gear manufacturers, tour companies, content creators, rental services, and trail guide apps like Alltrails. The market for bikepacking bags in particular on marketplaces like Amazon has grown significantly in recent years as cyclists seek lighter, more technical gear to store their stuff.