Travel Chic

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A framework for going somewhere that actually means something

There's a specific kind of disappointment that hits when you finally arrive somewhere you've always wanted to go… and feel almost nothing.

Not because the place isn't beautiful. It is. But it's also crowded in a particular way, curated for consumption in a particular way, and somewhere between the influencer coffee shops and the two-hour lines, the thing that made it worth visiting has quietly left the building.

This is what over tourism actually costs us. Not just the locals, though it absolutely displaces them, prices them out of their own neighborhoods, and erodes the culture that made a place worth visiting in the first place!! It costs the traveler, too. It hollows out the very experience we were chasing.

"An estimated 80% of global tourists visit the same 10% of destinations."

We are loving certain places to death, and in doing so, we are losing them.

So I started thinking differently about where I go and why. What emerged is a simple framework I now use when choosing any destination, one that makes the trip more intentional, more meaningful, and honestly, just more interesting.

I call it C.H.I.C.

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Curated

A good trip starts long before you book anything. It starts with a question:

why this place, right now ?

Curation means choosing a destination with intention, not because it's trending or because someone posted a beautiful picture that made you want to be there too. It means matching where you go to the season of life you're actually in.

Backpacking Spain at 22 is a completely different trip than backpacking at 40! The Amalfi Coast hits differently when you're celebrating something than when you're recovering from something. Kenya means something different on a solo trip than it does with family.

The destination isn't the point on its own.

You in that destination, right now, for a real reason, that's the point.

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Human

The best part of travel has never been the landmark.

It's the person you met on the way there, the family who invited you in for tea, the cooking class where nobody spoke the same language but everyone understood the food.

Rich culture is everywhere,  but you have to show up for it. That means slowing down enough to actually be somewhere, not just photograph it. Take the siesta in Spain. Take the cooking class in Italy. Say yes to the stranger's invitation. People genuinely love to share their culture; we just have to stop moving fast enough to receive it.

As cheesy as it sounds, the human moments are the ones you carry home. Everything else just kinda fades.

Intentional

Choosing the right place is only half of it. The other half is how you actually show up once you're there.

Intentional travel means resisting the urge to over-schedule, over-document, and move through a place so quickly you never actually feel it. It means putting the phone down long enough to notice what's in front of you. It means staying in one neighborhood instead of trying to see everything, because depth always beats coverage.

A lot of us bring our productivity culture on vacation with us without realizing it.

Treating a trip like a checklist, optimizing for content, measuring the day by how much we got done. But a place can't get under your skin if you never slow down enough to let it. The moments that stay with you, the ones you're still thinking about years later, are almost always the unplanned ones.

The ones that only happened because you weren't rushing somewhere else.

Go slower than feels comfortable. That's usually the right pace.

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Conscious

Tourism, at its best, is a transfer of value. 

You bring resources into a community, and the community shares its culture, its food, its landscape with you. When that exchange is working, everyone benefits. When it isn't, locals get priced out and places get hollowed out.

Being a conscious traveler means making that exchange real. Stay in a locally owned boutique hotel instead of an Airbnb that's quietly removing housing stock from a residential neighborhood. Eat at the family restaurant, not the chain that opened because tourists showed up. Hire the local guide. Buy from the local market.

The travel industry is slowly shifting toward this, and it's long overdue. But the shift happens one booking at a time, and we get to decide where our money actually lands.

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Travel at its best isn't consumption.

It's contact, with a place, with its people, with a version of yourself that only shows up when you're somewhere unfamiliar.

The checklist trip and the hot-spot photo will always be available to you. But travel,  genuine, unfiltered travel, requires a little more intention. It requires going somewhere for a real reason, showing up slowly, and leaving the place better than the algorithm left it.

That's the trip worth taking... and just so totally chic.