The next luxury hospitality trend? A trip with no agenda

March 11, 2025

Jesse Ashlock is deputy global editorial director at Condé Nast Traveler

The global wellness travel industry, currently being satirized on the third season of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” is soon expected to surpass $1 trillion annually.

Why are those who can afford such trips feeling so unwell? One culprit is the modern-day attention economy, whose impact on our psyches has been dissected in numerous books, most recently Chris Hayes’s bestselling “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.”

In it, Hayes writes of the attention-age sensation that “our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will.” In this moment of such extraordinary discord and clamor in America and the world, that feeling has only grown more pronounced.

A wellness vacation dangles the promise of helping us reclaim our minds.

Costly stays
There’s a simpler way that travel can help us wrest back control of our interior lives, which is to use it as a vehicle for practicing what the Dutch call “niksen” – doing nothing more than being fully present in the world.

Wellness retreats, with their guided meditations, soundbaths, movement classes and nature walks, can certainly help in this. But their emphasis on productive outcomes, data collection and sometimes overcrowded schedules can feel as demanding as life back home.

They can also make guests vulnerable to the same smartphone-aided competitive pressures as everything else in life, which isn’t exactly a path to wellness. The resort in the new season of “The White Lotus” is nothing more than “a Disneyland for rich bohemians from Malibu in their Lululemon yoga pants,” as one character ruefully puts it.

#FOMO, #NOMO and #JOMO
There’s a notorious hashtag for the feeling that this tendency leads to: #FOMO, the fear of missing out, that quintessential form of attention-age anxiety.

In her 2019 manifesto “How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” author Jenny Odell proposes that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, or the necessity of missing out. “There is a kind of nothing,” she writes, “that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something.”

Recently, certain independent-minded precincts of the internet have gone a step further by proposing #JOMO – the joy of missing out – and travel providers have been taking cues from this idea. The experiential travel agency Black Tomato has begun offering trips in Chile’s Atacama Desert and the Greek islands where the sole objective is to contemplate the emotions stirred by the landscape.

Now, booking a fancy trip to an exotic locale where the whole point is to do nothing is a luxury many can’t afford. But there are other ways to use travel to feel the joy of missing out.

Visit a humble state park rather than a national one, or a popular summer destination in the wintertime. As an ancillary benefit, you’ll be traveling with the knowledge that you’re not contributing to the scourge of overtourism.

You can even take a vacation in your own backyard. Go for a long, slow walk in the woods—forest bathing, to use the delightful Japanese coinage—or just plop yourself on a park bench for a while, listening to the birds in the trees and the city noises beyond.

Spend an afternoon wandering a neighborhood you don’t know. Embrace boredom – it’s a sign that your mind belongs to you.

Travel as a tool of resistance
I am lucky enough to have been to wellness clinics where I have eaten artfully abstemious meals, plunged into an ice bath under the watchful gaze of a white-coated attendant, listened to Tibetan singing bowls played by the sea and been hooked up to space-age machines that promise to regenerate my cells.

I have also had the privilege of seeing Machu Picchu, the Galápagos and the Big Five. All are experiences I regularly recommend to others.

But when I take an inventory of my most meaningful, restorative travel memories, they don’t necessarily involve doing the big, special thing. I think of cycling with a brand-new friend along a lonely country road in the hills of northern Spain; walking the evening streets of Cairo for hours with my father, without a GPS or a destination in mind; and watching my children erect a driftwood fort on an unremarkable beach in the San Juan Islands.

These were all times when I felt fully attuned to my company and my surroundings. Present.

Alive. Use travel to seek out those moments too.

Because often when you go looking for nothing, something is what you’ll actually find.

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