A surprise trip sounds crazy until you see what research says about why choosing a destination is exhausting. Six studies and an idea we've been mulling over for months.
Fifteen tabs and no reservations.
It's midnight and you have fifteen tabs open. A flight comparison, two blogs with the same must-see list, a map, a hotel search engine, a forum thread from 2019, and a budget calculator.
You started with enthusiasm three weeks ago. Now you're tired, you haven't booked anything, and you have the uneasy feeling that whatever you choose will be worse than something you haven't found yet.
If this sounds familiar, you're not an indecisive person. It happens to half of Spain, it has a name, and it has an explanation. And it is, ultimately, the reason why something called a surprise trip exists.
Planning a trip takes more out of you than buying a house.
A survey of one thousand people in Spain yielded this result: 26% spend more time planning their vacation than deciding to buy a home. For 41%, organizing the trip of the year is a monumental task.
The company named the phenomenon wanderlost — the reverse of wanderlust. It's no longer the desire to leave: it's the overwhelm of having too many options to choose from.
Dr. Faye Begeti, a neurologist at Oxford University Hospital, explains it this way: every decision forces us to divide our attention among options, compare them, and weigh their advantages. This juggling act falls on the prefrontal cortex and depletes mental resources. And she adds the most painful nuance: The pressure to make the perfect decision can kill the excitement before even leaving home.
More options, fewer decisions.
They set up a tasting booth in a California supermarket. Some days they offered six varieties of jam; other days, twenty-four. The large table attracted more people—but when it came to buying, the result was the opposite.
They bought ten times more.
They looked, they hesitated, and they left.
The work was titled "When Choice is Demotivating". Faced with too many alternatives, many people do not choose badly — they simply do not choose. Swap the jams for twelve countries and you've got your fifteenth tab at midnight.
The price of searching the best.
Those who strive to find the best possible option dedicate more time, compare more, and put in more effort. And yet they end up less satisfied and more prone to regret than those who settle for something good enough.
A study followed recent graduates during their job search. The result summarizes the paradox better than any explanation:
than those who did not maximize
during and after the search
They got more. They enjoyed it less.
What happens when you don't know.
Let's turn the question around: what if the problem isn't choosing badly, but having to choose at all?
Participants received something pleasant and unexpected under two conditions: some could understand where it came from; others remained completely unaware. The good mood lasted longer in those who did not understand it.
They called it the pleasure paradox: we want to explain the good things to ourselves, but in explaining them, we exhaust them sooner. And there's a revealing detail—the participants didn't anticipate this effect. If you asked them, they said they preferred to know.
Wolfram Schultz, from Cambridge, described something similar in the brain: dopaminergic neurons react strongly to unexpected good things, and are hardly affected by expected good things.
The brain doesn't respond so much to what's good as to what's good that wasn't in the script.
Schultz, W. (1998) · Journal of Neurophysiology
The eleven destinations that you discarded.
When you choose between twelve destinations, the eleven you discarded don't disappear. They linger in your mind. If it rains, you think about the one with the best weather. If the hotel isn't what you expected, you think about the other one you saw.
That doesn't happen on a surprise trip.
There are no eleven ghosts. There is only the place where you are.
Today, before traveling, you can find out practically everything. You can see the hotel's interior, explore the streets on your phone, read about where to eat, and on Instagram you've already been to places you've never even set foot in. You can know what to expect before you arrive.
What if this time we didn't know anything about that? We are preparing a surprise trip for a small group: a trip where the destination will not be known until arriving at the airport, and where the rest will be discovered as we go.
Secret
A new place for us too
We want to go somewhere new to everyone—to the travelers and, if we succeed, to us as well. It's an exception to our usual approach: we meticulously plan our itineraries before offering them, and that doesn't change for our other trips. But here, we want something different—to arrive somewhere and truly discover it for ourselves.
That it has a bit of everything
Nature, culture, food, activities, moments of silence, and also days for doing absolutely nothing. The idea is that travel shouldn't revolve around just one way of experiencing it. And above all, that there are things to remember when you return—because what we almost always take away are moments that weren't planned. So we thought: what if nothing is planned?
This time we don't want to show you the trip before you experience it. We want to discover it with you.
The destination is a secret.
The standard of the accommodation isn't.
It will be the same as on any of our trips. The same goes for the service, the pace, and the group size, which will still be 6 to 13 people.
The mystery lies in the place, not in how we're going to take care of you. A surprise trip doesn't mean an impromptu trip.
Once it's finalized, we'll announce it here first: what it will be like, who can attend, and everything else you need to know. For now, we can only share the idea, as we're still developing it. It'll be a few months.
The flight, the accommodation, every transfer.
Everything will be taken care of.
The only thing missing
is knowing where.
23 things that no one tells you before booking
- The myth of the last-minute bargain — and the months when flights actually go down.
- The hidden fees that eat up €90-120 of a two-week trip.
- The insurance that is worthwhile and the one that only gives false protection.
- The first 48 hours back — what separates returning renewed from returning broken.
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Studies cited
- Skyscanner/OnePoll (2025). Report Wanderlost, with Dr. Faye Begeti, Oxford University Hospital. Survey of 1,000 people in Spain.
- Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When Choice is Demotivating. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006.
- Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing Versus Satisficing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1178–1197.
- Iyengar, S. S., Wells, R. E., & Schwartz, B. (2006). Doing Better but Feeling Worse. Psychological Science, 17(2), 143–150.
- Wilson, T. D., Centerbar, D. B., Kermer, D. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). The Pleasures of Uncertainty. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(1), 5–21.
- Schultz, W. (1998). Predictive Reward Signal of Dopamine Neurons. Journal of Neurophysiology, 80(1), 1–27.