How we’re learning to log off and love ourselves
That’s why, this year, we’re searching for ways to make travel simpler, more streamlined, and rawer. To embark on a pursuit of purity, stripping travel back to experiences that are more primal, and deeply relaxing. Disconnected. Logged-off. Immersed. This is something we first reflected on with our Travel Trends report from the faraway days of early January. And we haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
It’s why we’re developing new itineraries and services designed to help our discerning travelers get back to basics and to find windows for disconnection and reconnection. And it’s why, historically, we’ve developed services like Get Lost and Blink. Travel experiences designed to help clients locate their inner selves.
But what does simpler, immersive travel actually look like? Perhaps it’s finding the quietude of a private cabin amongst the crags of the Dolomites. Maybe it’s sharing a star-gazing ceremony with an Andean shaman. It might be a hotel perched 6,000ft above sea-level in Alaska, or time spent with the rural communities of mountainous Ladakh. It might mean wild swimming in the glacial lakes of New Zealand, or hiking across a vast and silent wilderness in Iceland.
It might last one night, a weekend, or an entire month.
Opening windows of disconnection
Burnout isn’t new. But as discerning, health-conscious travelers think more closely about their spiritual as well as physical wellbeing, they’re realizing that throwing away their phones isn’t necessarily the solution. If we’re not going to abandon society, how might we find windows in which to mediate our relationship with it?
For the first time, we’re searching for solutions that go beyond technological interventions, apps and accessories. We’re looking to ourselves, and our relationship with the world.
The more we speak to our clients, the more we realize that there is a clear and enthusiastic demand to find ways to strip back the noise and get back to something much, much simpler. To remember a time when we were a little less obsessed with data, and when experiencing a moment was unfiltered by phones, devices and volume.