The Manifesto

"Luxury" in travel has become synonymous with exclusion - exclusive access, exclusive experiences, exclusive spaces. The word now functions primarily as a barrier: it signals who belongs and who doesn't.

We reject this framing. Not because comfort is wrong, but because luxury-as-exclusion corrupts both the traveler and the destination. It transforms places into products and people into service providers.

What if luxury meant something else? What if the greatest luxury was attention - the rare capacity to be fully present, undistracted, engaged with what's actually in front of you?

The travel industry sells "authentic experiences" as if authenticity could be packaged and purchased. It cannot. The moment something is marketed as authentic, it's already compromised - now existing as much for the viewer as for itself. Philosophers like Charles Taylor and others have explored how authenticity functions as a modern ideal - and how it can become performative.

We're suspicious of this language. Not because authentic experiences don't exist, but because they cannot be guaranteed, purchased, or reviewed. They emerge from conditions that the industry finds uncomfortable: uncertainty, discomfort, time, and genuine vulnerability.

The search for authenticity is often really a search for validation - proof that we're the kind of travelers who see beneath the surface. This search usually defeats itself. The harder we try to find the authentic, the more it recedes.

The travel industry is built on more - more destinations, more experiences, more access. Its business model requires constant growth, constant novelty, constant consumption.

We believe in restraint. Not as deprivation, but as focus. Fewer places, more depth. Longer stays, less rushing. Repeated visits to the same communities rather than a checklist of new ones.

Restraint acknowledges limits - limits to what we can understand as outsiders, limits to how many tourists a community can absorb (a phenomenon now studied as overtourism), limits to how much of the world we can actually engage with meaningfully in one lifetime.

The industry calls them "experiences" - discrete, bounded, consumable units of engagement. This framing turns people and places into products available for your consumption.

We prefer "relationship" - ongoing, reciprocal, evolving connection. Relationships require return visits. They require attention to how your presence affects the other party. They require accepting that you might not always get what you want.

Tourism built on relationship looks different. It has volume limits because communities can only absorb so much. It has repeat visitors because that's how trust develops. It has constraints on behavior because relationships have boundaries.

A week in a place doesn't make you understand it. A conversation with a local doesn't give you insight into their life. A meal in someone's home doesn't mean you know their family.

Travel provides exposure, not understanding. Claiming otherwise is a kind of imperialism - the belief that our brief presence grants us knowledge of places and peoples whose depths we'll never reach.

Humility about what we don't know is not pessimism. It's accuracy. And accuracy is the beginning of genuine respect for the places we visit.