The luxury trips start from $5,420 per person based on double occupancy and generally last a week, covering destinations that range from Cuba to Morocco and Ibiza. Don’t see your problem addressed on Black Tomato’s short list? The company can whip up a custom solution, though more trips will be formalized soon.
A Broader Movement
Marchant’s offering is the first formal product to promote travel-as-therapy, but others are on the same wavelength. Most notable is David Prior, who co-founded an eponymous travel membership club last fall on similar principles as Bring it Back.
“So many of our early clients came to us looking for a total reboot,” Prior says. “And our answer for that is to go way beyond the spa and the hiking vacation—to skip the five-day boot camp resorts and do something far more creative and meditative.” Learning a new skill in its place of origin, he says, is a particularly good strategy. “It’s the idea of using your hands to get out of your head.”
For one client in a creative rut, that meant traveling from Tasmania to Seville to the English countryside, learning different ways to harvest fruit and produce jam—a favorite foodstuff—in each destination. For a mother looking to connect with her teen son, it was a series of pottery and indigo-dying classes with Japanese masters.
And sometimes, it’s more of an internal journey that’s required, Prior says. For a major tech founder who needed a sabbatical, it was showing him the world through a nonbusiness lens—and shutting down Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia for the ultimate contemplative moment. And for a client who’d started to feel overwhelmingly jaded about the human condition in light of current-day politics, the prescription was a spiritual escape in Varanasi and Rajasthan, in India. Each of Prior’s trips is planned as a one-off—what he calls a personalized “travel prescription.”
“We want to send people where they’ll feel most like themselves, and identify what will be most freeing for them,” says Prior.
The Medicine You Don’t Know You Need
Marchant and Prior are ahead of a trend, albeit one in its infancy.
“Most of our clients’ travels are motivated by endangered experiences—wildlife or cultural conservation—and increasingly by a desire to contribute philanthropically to the places they visit,” says Jimmy Carroll, co-founder of Pelorus, a British-based expedition travel company. His company has a life coach on its payroll who can build programs for guests looking to spiritually reset or energize for life’s next challenges, but Carroll says demand is still nascent for this type of offering.