Let me describe a holiday you may recognise. Five cities in seven days. A suitcase that never fully unpacks. A camera roll bulging with photos of landmarks you half-remember, taken mostly so you could prove you’d been. You come home more exhausted than when you left — and quietly, guiltily wonder whether you actually enjoyed any of it.
I’ve taken that holiday. More than once, I’m slightly ashamed to say. And it turns out I’m far from alone in quietly retiring it.
Because something shifted after the great post-pandemic travel boom. The frantic list-ticking sprints around the globe, which have been giving way to a gentler, wiser philosophy: fewer trips, longer stays, deeper engagement — the kind of understanding of a place that a long weekend cannot buy.
The end of collecting countries
For years, we were sold a very particular idea of travel: cram in as many destinations as humanly possible, optimise ruthlessly for the Instagram portfolio, and count your worth in passport stamps. And for a while, we all played along.
But a specific sort of traveller has started to opt out — and I suspect you might recognise them. The 35-55 year-old with a bit of disposable income, a painfully finite holiday allowance, and a dawning suspicion that stamp-collecting was delivering ever-diminishing returns on anything resembling a real experience. What’s replacing it is slower, more considered, and yes, more expensive per day. But it’s also, and this is the whole point, far more memorable per trip. It’s the same instinct that has me arguing we should collect afternoons rather than objects — only now it’s aimed squarely at how we travel.
Wellness, but make it meaningful
The numbers tell the story rather loudly. Wellness travel has grown into a market worth somewhere north of a trillion dollars — one of the fastest-growing corners of the entire industry, comfortably outpacing tourism.
But here’s the bit I find genuinely interesting: the defining feature isn’t the spa menu. It’s the intention. These are trips built around a specific practice, a transformation, a recovery — not merely a change of scenery and a nicer dressing gown. Fitness retreats, digital-detox retreats, cooking retreats, creative retreats — all the sorts of things that need proper time to work on you, the kind of extended immersion a weekend can’t deliver. Festivals like the Big Retreat and Love Trails here in the UK have made the whole format surprisingly accessible, too. It isn’t only for people with a spare fortune and a personal guru.
Living somewhere, not just visiting it
Then there’s the workation — that eyebrow-raising blend of remote work and genuinely getting to know a new place — which has quietly graduated from fringe experiment to legitimate way of life.
Governments noticed and, unusually, kept up. Portugal’s D7 visa, Spain’s digital nomad visa and a growing family of European equivalents have given longer-stay travellers a legal framework for extended stays. And so the one-week city break becomes, for some, the one-month stay — long enough to become a regular at the little restaurant on the corner, to fall into a neighbourhood rhythm, to experience that particular, underrated joy of knowing a place well enough to have a favourite bench. Familiarity, it turns out, is its own kind of luxury.
The pull of the ancient and the quiet
And then there’s nature, staging the quietest comeback of all. National Park attendance has been smashing records worldwide, and the app data underneath it is striking: AllTrails swelled to ninety million users in 2025, up a fifth in a single year, while hiking clubs grew almost sixfold, per Strava — nearly double the pace of run clubs.
That’s not merely a fitness fad. It reads to me like a genuine reconnection with landscape — a growing hunger for places that are ancient, hushed, and mercifully free of the commercial clutter of cities. People are organising their precious leisure time around simply being in particular landscapes. After a decade of screens, there’s something rather moving about that.
So if your next break is starting to feel like a to-do list with a boarding pass attached, perhaps that’s worth listening to. The richest trips I’ve taken lately weren’t the ones where I saw the most. They were the ones where I noticed the most.
Fewer stamps. Deeper roots. I think we’re onto something.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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