2015 will bring changes on airplanes, aboard cruise ships and in hotels, and South Florida is expected to benefit.

Travel trends will include more millennial and business travel, more river cruises, increased mobile usage, and longer and higher-priced hotel stays.

If you’re planning to travel in 2015, consider these insights:

Air travel

Cheap airfares to Europe are in the cards, courtesy of lower fuel prices, airfare specialists predict.

Several carriers offer nonstop flights to European cities from the Fort Lauderdale and Miami international airports, and some will add routes this year.

“This year with fuel prices down, the one bargain that we’re likely to see is international flying, and prices for international flying come down,” Rick Seaney, co-founder of travel website FareCompare.com, said in a recent podcast.

For European travel, the cheapest days to fly will be March 12, May 15 and Aug. 23, key dates before seasonal prices take effect, Seaney said. Airfares departing on the March and May days are about 15 percent to 30 percent cheaper that those that immediately follow, while Aug. 23 marks the end of peak summer prices, he said.

For Spring Break, although airfares tend to increase sharply, travelers can still snag deals by flying on Tuesday of the spring break week and returning on Saturday, Seaney said. By avoiding weekend-to-weekend flights, you can save up to 50 percent or more.

As for summer, the best airfare bargains will be found if you fly up to the first week in June or after the third week in August, Seaney advised. But whatever the date, travelers should buy their tickets no later than 30 days before departure.

Hot destinations

Toronto, New Orleans are among North American favorites this year and China for international travel, while Asheville, N.C., makes it into the top five for laid-back, smaller American cities, according to travel website Orbitz.com.

One upside for South Floridians is that low-cost carriers like Spirit added flights last year, some to hot spots like New Orleans and Asheville.

Spirit’s once-daily nonstop service between Fort Lauderdale and New Orleans launched in August, while Allegiant Air added a flight from West Palm Beach to Asheville in May. Allegiant already served Asheville from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

“Spirit is growing rather aggressively again at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood after a few years of focusing its growth elsewhere such as in Dallas,” said Seth Kaplan, managing partner of Airline Weekly, a Fort Lauderdale-based publication. “Lately they’ve been very aggressive against JetBlue, and Fort Lauderdale is a key battleground in that war, and that’s good for consumers.”

Airline rewards

If you plan to parlay airline miles into free or discounted travel rewards, you may be surprised by changes some airlines made to frequent flier programs in 2014.

For consumers, the biggest changes are occurring at Delta and United, which will now grant awards based on how much travelers spend rather than how far they fly, Kaplan said. Southwest, JetBlue and Virgin America are already doing this, he said.

The changes will result in most travelers accumulating fewer miles, and those that spend the most, by purchasing first-class tickets, for example, will earn more than before, Kaplan said. “Airline loyalty programs have become somewhat less generous to the average traveler than was the case in previous decades.”

Cruising

More people will explore cruising as a vacation option in 2015, according to trade group Cruise Lines International Associations, which represents the world’s leading cruise lines including Carnival, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian.

In 2014, some 21.7 million consumers globally were forecast to take a cruise, the majority from North America, according to CLIA.

The Washington, D.C.-based trade group will officially announce its 2015 cruise forecast and key industry trends on Jan. 27.

European river cruising will continue to blossom in 2015 as more travelers seek to experience an authentic Europe while only unpacking once, said Vicky Garcia, chief operating officer and co-owner of Cruise Planners, an American Express Travel Representative in Coral Springs.

“The smaller river cruise ships allow travelers to get close to the city centers in Europe,” Garcia said.

Others see similar trends.

“River cruises have been in huge demand, and we’ve seen year-over-year growth of about 30 percent,” said Peter Friedman, a luxury travel specialist at Unique Travel of Palm Beach Inc. in Delray Beach.

Broward tourism officials want more Millennials to visit in 2015 Arlene Satchell Key marketing plans and tools for 2015 unveiled Thursday Key marketing plans and tools for 2015 unveiled Thursday ( Arlene Satchell ) –>

He’s also anticipating higher demand for trips to South America, South Africa, Asia and within the U.S. as travelers avoid trouble spots in Europe.

“Europe is going to get hurt to some degree,” Friedman said.

Hotels

U.S. hotels should be fuller in 2015 and at higher rates, according to industry trackers STR and Tourism Economics.

Nationwide, hotel occupancy is expected to jump 1.1 percent to 65.1 percent, while the average daily rate will increase 5 percent to $121.37, the outfits predicted.

And South Florida hotels are poised to get their share.

“We expect continued rise in occupancy and rate as we see increasing demand exceeding the new supply [of rooms],” said Bob Diener, a Miami-based industry veteran who’s president of hotel booking website GetARoom.com.

Both Fort Lauderdale and Miami are in its top 10 markets for hotels being booked now for 2015, Diener said. “Cold weather is helping demand from air travelers, and lower gas prices are increasing demand for those driving in.”

To snag hotel deals in 2015, Diener says travelers should book rooms 14 to 21 days in advance or more; stay weekdays rather than weekends as these tend to be cheaper, particularly at beach hotels; and take advantage of flash sales that offer lower rates for a limited time.

Millennials

Millennial travelers, especially those aged 18 to 34 years, have a greater desire to travel in 2015 than their older counterparts, according to findings of a recent Hotwire.com survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults. And 70 percent of these younger adults are more likely to have budgeted money for annual travel than those ages 45 and over.

South Florida tourism officials are launching marketing programs to attract more millennials, and some hotels are also making property improvements to better cater to them.

“Millennial travelers are impacting the travel industry in a big way, particularly given their overall excitement and interest in taking more trips,” said Henrik Kjellberg, president of the Hotwire Group, in a statement.

ASHEVILLE – Saturday’s TEDxAsheville event could be the last of its kind, unless a new group of organizers decides to continue the local ideas conference.

“I like to do things like this in threes. The first time, I feel like that’s when I can make all the mistakes and learn all the hard lessons. The second time, I can start to figure out what those lessons are and then the third time is all about stretching and giving it away so that it can carry on beyond us,” said Brett McCall, executive director of the upcoming TEDxAsheville conference.

“I do have a small hope that someone would come to our event this year, and get excited enough to decide to produce TEDxAsheville 2016,” he added.

When TEDxAsheville started in 2009 as a spinoff of the popular California-based TED conference, which stands for technology, education and design, a line of people wrapped around the Orange Peel while they waited to get in the doors.

In 2011, the annual event changed venues and moved to Diana Wortham Theatre, where it stayed for another year before taking a two-year hiatus.

“We had been a state of growing and growing and growing, and it became exhausting,” said Mcall, who was involved in all of the TEDxAsheville events and served as the local conference’s executive director in 2011 and 2012. “Our whole team sort of fell apart and we needed a big team. In those years, we had at least nine organizers.”

This year, the event has been organized by three people: Jack Derbyshire, a recent UNC Asheville graduate who organized the TEDxUNCAsheville in 2014, Tim Scroggs, a graphic designer, and McCall.

Referencing his rule of leadership threes, McCall said this would be his final year organizing TEDxAsheville. Derbyshire recently moved to Raleigh after getting a job as a software engineer with IBM. Scroggs will be finishing his education at UNCA and working alongside his wife, Meagan Scroggs, at their design agency.

With 2015 being the last year planning and producing TEDxAsheville, McCall said the trio of organizers wanted to offer something personal, authentic and meaningful.

“We wanted to keep it intimate, do it for ourselves and do it in a way that we would be excited to invite the smartest people in town and the most mover-shaker people to it,” McCall said. “I felt like the three of us could pull together a pretty great program and we could do it in a way that was unique, and unique to TEDxAsheville even.”

For starters, the event will be taking place from 4-8 p.m. Saturday at the newly reopened Altamont Theatre — a significantly smaller venue than in years past.

Because of this, seating will be limited to 100 people. Even the tickets, which are available online at tedxasheville.com, are being done in a new way this year.

Audience members must apply for admission into the event by filling out a questionnaire.

Derbyshire, who was in charge of coordinating the content of this year’s talk and is the primary license holder for the event, said no one who has applied for a ticket has been denied.

“So why have an application if we’re saying yes to everyone? If there’s someone who looks at a five-question application — we don’t say you have to write this many words or anything like that — and if they don’t want to take the five minutes to fill that out, I wonder how much they are going to value the event,” Derbyshire said.

Though the event was not sold out as of Wednesday afternoon, McCall said he has always wanted to have an audience as curated as the speakers at TEDxAsheville.

“I really wanted to have an audience full of people where any one of them could be brought up on stage to share their talk,” he said. “I feel like we’re getting that. People who are applying are excited about something they’ve got to share, whether it’s a weight-loss story, or the way that other TED talks have impacted their own lives, or the business that they finally decided to start.”

However, there has been some criticism of this year’s event, especially its marketing and branding.

“We did it (marketing) very limitedly. We didn’t really talk about it much at all except for the last two weeks. We’ve had some push-back. There have been a lot of organizers that had not heard about it until this week. They are disappointed they didn’t get to hear about it until now. We have several speakers, great speakers, who were contacted too late and aren’t going to be there,” McCall said. “But we did it the same way we did our speakers and our attendees. It’s been completely organic and completely unfolding before us. We’re leaning on the TED brand and the success of TEDxAsheville’s four years.”

This year’s theme is “expose,” which means the speakers are being encouraged to talk about their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, as well as their strengths and success stories. Two of the seven speakers include Highland Brewing Company founder Oscar Wong and Thomas Peterson, a Nobel Prize recipient and principal scientist for Asheville’s National Climactic Data Center.

“There’s a lot of misperceptions around why people do what they do. When I meet TED speakers, they are super approachable and they will tell you they failed, they were surrounded by great people and they couldn’t have done this by themselves. These are things that we hear a lot but I don’t think we really understand what that means,” McCall said. “We really wanted to challenge our speakers this year to talk about the parts that are ugly, that are uncomfortable, that they don’t normally talk about with regard to how they got to success. That was an important part of it, and we really wanted our audience, as well, to be able to come and take off their mask.”

However, Scroggs said there have been some people who think that his design for the TEDxAsheville event took off far too much.

Scroggs said some downtown businesses waited until the design for the fliers was complete before they allowed them to be hung in their stores. After seeing the design, one business said it could not put them up due to the content.

In keeping with the “expose” theme, the posters and website feature a man and a woman standing in the snow with their pants around their knees, with their hands covering their groin area.

“When I first started pulling together a concept for the word ‘expose,’ we hadn’t even really dug up what exactly it meant. I was more going for something that was abstract, but as we developed the concept, nothing felt better than a literal representation of everything metaphorical,” Scroggs said. “They are not fully exposed because we can never be fully exposed. That’s where the imagery came from.”

Regardless of the last-minute marketing push, Derbyshire said he’s hopeful the event will do well because of what it represents and what it can do.

“Connecting people is one of our biggest goals, but what we really want to come out of this are maybe three things,” Derbyshire said. “The first one is definitely connecting people to each other who probably wouldn’t meet each other otherwise who have a passion for this city. We want to help them make really cool innovations happen or make it the startup mecca or whatever, and give Asheville fame beyond tourism.”

The evening’s presentations will be videotaped and submitted to TED, along with the profits made from the local event’s ticket sales, in hopes that local talks will be shared with people worldwide.

McCall said he likes to think of TED talks as “brain spas” that can spur people to engage in profound conversations and make meaningful connections. Though he will not be organizing the TEDxAsheville event next year, McCall said he will still seek out events in the future, whether they are TED events or not, that foster meaningful dialogue.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be completely removed from TED, and I think I’ve got a TED talk in me,” he said. “If they want to see something different, then get involved.”