Five Ways to Make Your Future Travel More Meaningful

After a year of tight travel restrictions, the urge to go out and explore has never felt stronger. From memorable landscapes to new cultures and culinary delights, we look at the best ways to make your future travel experiences feel more meaningful. Here are five ways to get inspired about travel again. 

From the quiet solitude of a balmy beach to the freedom of a mountain range, new and uncharted geographies have a unique ability to enchant us. For some, travel may be interchangeable with tourism, a sense of casual and convenient jet-setting to familiar holiday retreats. Yet, for many others, travel describes a kind of wayward lifestyle, where new and memorable landscapes have the potential to enrich our lives.

Through more meaningful experiences, you can go beyond the tradition of collecting souvenirs and trinkets and bring home memories that last a lifetime. Despite multiple lockdowns, the appetite for travel has only grown with media pundits predicting a boom in domestic travels. When creating more impactful, memorable experiences from your next travel, consider these top five tips that will help enrich your experiences.

5. Learn some of the local languages

It isn’t easy to pick up a new language without years of study. Yet, when traveling abroad, you can use the opportunity of new people and cultures to experiment and test new languages. This will encourage you to use travel as a learning device, pushing you into self-improvement as you explore local cultures of the places around you.

Modern tools have made most languages accessible and available, whether through textbook learning, or audio recordings. By engaging in this new skill, even if it’s not fully developed, you open yourself to more fully immerse in the experience of travel. You will not only connect more fluidly with local cultures, but you begin to understand outside perspectives, absorbing the culture more authentically. It even helps if you read about local histories and visit historical sites, which might inspire you to learn something new.

There’s a practical benefit to understanding foreign languages when you travel. You can engage in conversation with locals to find out about directions, recommendations for eating, or even hidden spots to explore.

4. Travel slow

Too often are holidays arranged to be convenient. When you travel to be freed from familiarity and you explore new cultures and countries, try doing so slowly and leisurely. Hurried vacations can too quickly become unmemorable; instead, allow yourself time to travel freely and without an over-demanding schedule.

Don’t force your trips into overly busy agendas. When you allow yourself time to slowly explore, dine and become immersed in the sights and sounds of new and exciting landscapes, you become more available to creating memories and new experiences. A city escape to Paris, for example, is much better enjoyed when you slowly stroll alongside the Seine or unwind over a camembert watching the bustle from Montmartre.

3. Visit new landscapes

Laundry lists are easy to occupy with names of hopeful destinations but seldom do we actually chase down these new and exciting landscapes and attempt to experience them for ourselves. If there’s a dream destination, one that’s been in your mind for years, chase after it and arrange to visit those countries that you feel a connection for.

Don’t settle for convenience, or feel swayed by postcards, but commit to places that resonate with you personally, because these are often the trips that come to define our lifestyles. Tourism is a persuasive force, but challenging yourself to craft experience outside of popular destinations can be rewarding.

It can seem cliché to use travel as a kind of personal resolution, but there’s something powerful in experiencing new landscapes that can influence your future holidays, too. After a year of lockdowns, committing to new travel experiences will certainly feel reinvigorating.

2. Travel for food

Travel is a sensory journey. Not only will you be confronted with new impressive views – such as Brazil’s panoramas of sprawling hilltops – but you will indulge in new smells and tastes, too.

Food is one way to experience something new, wholesome, and authentic. The culinary culture of local places is likely unique and, therefore, impossible to replicate. Consider how eating a new dish a day, and indulging in local cuisine, can inspire your travels. This has inspired countless novels, columns, shows, and even a trend called “food tourism”.

1. Travel by road

From the heights of a plane, the swooping fields and deep oceans below feel inspiring. Yet, if you want to more authentically experience a new country, try traveling by foot or car. The ever-popular road trip has become, nowadays, a device for self-discovery with more travelers opting to experience a new country by walking or driving.

The belief is that a traveler has more chance to experience a country’s scenery by exploring it on foot, or by car. The concept of a road trip has inspired popular writings from travel sites that map out optimized routes. Europe, for example, is a maze of scenic roads, often hanging onto mountainsides, or spiraling down deep green vistas of remote woodlands.