This New Travel Trend Is Absurd and Exhausting. You Might Want to Give It a Try.

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It takes a lot for a stunt on Instagram Reels to jolt me. You will not raise my heart rate by backflipping off a rooftop onto another one, or throwing a giant rock off a suspended bridge 800 feet in the air, or intentionally getting yourself bitten by a rattlesnake. But a few months ago, I came across something that shook me to my core: a 28-year-old man boarding an April afternoon flight from JFK to Cairo, landing in Egypt at 5 a.m., sightseeing for a day, and flying back to New York that night, with the whole thing packed into a crisp, nutritious minute of vertical video.

It was his chipperness that first caught my attention, the way he grinned as he explained the NYC–Cairo day trip he was about to undertake. “Good night,” the traveler, Kevin Droniak, tells us as he pulls down a sleep mask on the plane. “And good morning from the Great Pyramids of Giza,” he carries on from, well, the Great Pyramids of Giza. “No one talks about how the pyramids make you peckish,” he points out, as we cut to the most Instagrammable of all meals: some delicious-looking meat eaten over an open flame (aka Egyptian mashawy). We see his “first and last Egyptian sunset” and a brief stop in a hotel to freshen up “since I feel so bedraggled.” Seconds later, we’re back at JFK, our influencer-explorer left with a T-shirt and internet virality—now 250,000 followers—for his trouble.

“Let me know if you would do this,” he says in signing off, “or if you are mentally stable.”

Solo travel is Droniak’s thing, and everyone in the attention economy needs to have a thing. He had chronicled about 20 of these flying day trips when we spoke, and the number grows all the time. Most trips aren’t as ambitious as Egypt, but include everywhere from New Orleans to Paris to Montreal to Utah. I am held rapt by Droniak’s videos for two reasons: One, they are absurd, and two, they look like so much fun.

There might be a third reason. I wondered if Droniak’s thing had caught my eye because it was the maximally absurd version of a travel dynamic that I often feel myself. And, I suppose fourth, if I felt that way, was it possible that this little pocket of travel influencerdom turned out to offer a descriptive insight on how a lot of people are interacting with travel? After further review: Yeah.

Deranged as it may be to fly across the world and back in a day for fun, American travel is moving toward that pole. “This trend is becoming more and more obvious,” Becky Liu-Lastres, an associate professor at Indiana University’s Department of Tourism, Event, and Sport Management in Indianapolis, told me. “People, especially families, taking vacations at a high frequency, but shorter distance and shorter stay so they can save money but, meanwhile, enjoy the leisure and vacation opportunities.”

I found it impossible to get perfect national data on how Americans travel, but the available evidence is a mosaic pointing toward people preferring to travel in short bursts. We have collectively taken fewer vacation days since the 1980s, according to data from the American Travel Association, and Expedia’s Vacation Deprivation Report finds that our country is bad at getting away. With that limited time, we are committed to getting away often, if not for long. Deloitte, which has surveyed Americans’ travel plans since 2021, finds that this year in particular, more people are planning trips of three nights or fewer. Individual travel budgets are going up, but the budgets for our longest trips are holding flat, suggesting that the money’s got to go elsewhere.

Quick trips now have a cottage industry around them. Airlines have been in this game for many years. Who among us has not gotten a Southwest email urging us to book a flight on sale the following weekend for approximately $39? Many corners of the travel world now seem especially geared toward this person too. “We’re seeing more customers who want a quick recharge. That’s become really common,” Alex Ailoto told me. Ailoto is co-founder of Whimstay, a platform that connects travelers who are feeling a getaway itch to last-minute short-term rental homes at severe markdowns.

The least disputed reason for the move toward shorter trips is money. It was the first thing Liu-Lastres mentioned to me, and it is the subject of much of Deloitte’s report. (“Many travelers who are planning on decreasing budgets are shifting spending away from one big trip in favor of shorter, more frequent trips, a preference that rose from 18% in March to 28% in April.”) But these are matters of shifting budgets, not of people declining to spend their dollars on trips. Deloitte’s report found that half the people who were planning to spend more on their longest summer trip than they did last year were doing it “because the trip now feels more special.”

In some key ways, this conversation is a rerun. Downbeat feelings about the economy affecting consumer behavior is just about the most normal thing that has ever happened. Businesses have catered to last-minute travel whims forever. Ailoto thinks of his platform as “Hotwire or HotelTonight but for short-term rentals.” Travelers wanting to make quick stops in photogenic destinations is also a tale as old as time. “What younger generations are doing now—short trips to landmarks for checklist photos—isn’t new,” Liu-Lastres said. “In the ’80s, big group tours did the same thing: visit the site, take a photo, move on.”

Post-COVID travel feels like its own beast, though, and specifically like a beast that will encourage all of us to take a million short trips for the rest of our lives. Remote work and the rise of “bleisure” have made it way easier for bunches of us to finish up work on a Thursday afternoon, drive somewhere that night, work from an Airbnb kitchen on Friday morning, have a weekend, and be back in the computer mines by Monday morning. And as jealousy-inspiring as your aunt’s Flickr album of her Jeep safari may have been, a nice viral travel video has intoxicating properties of which our ancestors never dreamed. The point isn’t that we do as we see on TikTok, but that we take on stripped-down versions of it.

“It’s common among the younger generation,” Liu-Lastres told me, “seeing what influencers do and mimicking it in a quick, affordable way.” In other words: You will not see a solo day trip to Italy and book a flight to Venice, but you are suddenly likelier to see if some pals want to do a weekend in Denver.

I have thought a bit lately about whether all of this is good. It’s been four years since my fiancé and I took a trip longer than eight or nine days to a place other than our parents’ houses. Almost all of our leisure travel lately has been for friends’ weddings, and the rest has been trips of between two and six days, with lots of time spent on laptops. On the one hand, Droniak sees the quick (and in his case exotic) day trip as a way of navigating certain capitalistic limitations. “The whole point of a day trip is that you don’t have to have a lot of vacation days,” he reminds his followers in one of his most recent videos.

Sure, but it’s a thin line between taking a liberating day trip and using it as an excuse not to rest more or not to get to know places in more detail. So I asked Droniak: Does he think that he’s sacrificing depth of experience in order to get in and out of places so quickly? (And implicitly, then, are his videos encouraging untold millions of scrollers to do the same?) He had thought about this a lot. “Doing day trips, it’s changed my mindset around travel so much,” he told me. “There’s one thing I want to do in each place. Egypt was the pyramids. So I check that off and experience that part of it, and then leave.”

That alone would be a nauseatingly superficial approach to travel, but there’s more to it: “I actually one day want to go back to Egypt and go for longer. Part of doing these day trips is getting a taste of the destination—less commitment than being there for multiple nights and then, who knows, not liking the vibe there. I’m able to now see that I like the place and, in my head, one day want to go back.” Droniak has conceded in his videos that some places, like Japan, are not day-trippable (at least from the U.S.) for a variety of reasons.

Most ideally, I’d have a job that carried a deep reservoir of paid time off. That is not the freelance writer and self-employed podcaster’s lot in life, and this exchange with Droniak made me realize why the most Instagram-friendly travel—short, sweet, pretty—is so appealing to me.

I am a master of sitting in a hotel room and finishing some not-even-that-time-sensitive work when I should be out at a tapas bar on a nominal vacation. (This is a direct scene from a stop in Madrid last year, I’m sad to admit.) Did I really feel Spain over five days of that kind of living? Would I have felt it more if I had committed to the bit and gone for one day (or, to be quasi-realistic, two and a half)? This is what Droniak says he feels when he does a solo day trip to some far-off place: “When you land somewhere and know that your time is fleeting—like, you have only X amount of hours—you don’t allow yourself to feel tired. You just kind of know,” he says. “When the plane hits the ground somewhere, I’m like, ‘This is the start of a crazy day.’ ” I don’t like that I find this approach so persuasive when the alternative is marinating in a place for two weeks, but I like it much more than thinking too much about why the latter feels so distant.

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