What Makes a Trip a Ten Out of Ten

Restorative Journeys

Ask someone about the best week of her life and she will almost never describe the itinerary. She will describe one morning that had nothing in it.

Restorative Journeys by Debra Orringer | Travel as Medicine / Health Research

There was a morning in the Cyclades where the only thing on the schedule was breakfast, and it went on until eleven because nobody had anywhere to be. Three years later that is still the trip she brings up. She does not talk about the flights, the room, or the view from the room. She talks about walking down to the bakery and the way the rest of the day sat open in front of her afterward.

I hear a version of this constantly. The parts people keep are rarely the parts they paid the most for.

The claim travel makes, and what the evidence actually supports

Restorative travel is usually sold on a mechanism. Stand somewhere vast, the pitch goes, and it will make you more generous, less time-pressured, changed in some measurable way. That promise traces back to a small group of psychology experiments run between 2012 and 2015, and this month those experiments were tested properly.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins and collaborating institutions ran six studies attempting to replicate three widely cited awe experiments, using video, writing, virtual reality and story-based methods to induce awe. The results were published in PLOS One in September 2026. Across 33 outcomes, only three reached statistical significance, and none of those three held up in a companion analysis. Three of the six were pre-registered direct replications with samples around two and a half times the size of the originals, and none of them reproduced the original effects.

Here is the finding I keep thinking about. The awe itself worked. In five of the six studies, participants reliably felt it. What did not show up were the downstream consequences, the shifts in generosity and in how much time people felt they had. The gap sits between feeling something and that feeling changing you.

The honest caveats are substantial, and the authors state them plainly. Recruitment was mostly online, which differed from the originals. The virtual reality study was very small. Only three of the six were direct replications. And the participants were considerably younger than the women I work with, with most samples clustering around 35 to 40, several majority male. No study looked at midlife women specifically. None of them tested awe on an actual trip, which is a meaningful limitation when the whole question is about travel.

There is also a result pointing the other way. In exploratory analyses, people who reported feeling more intense awe scored higher on several outcomes. The authors are careful to say this shows an association rather than a cause, and they are right to be careful. It is consistent with awe mattering in a way that a laboratory video cannot manufacture on demand.

What this changes about how I plan

It makes me more confident, which is probably the opposite of what you would expect.

A view does not have to earn its keep. The case for standing on a high ridge at seven in the morning rests on what standing there is like, and that case is stronger and more truthful than a claim about what it does to your generosity three hours later.

So when someone tells me she wants a ten out of ten, I stop asking where and start asking about shape. How many mornings in this week have nothing in them? Where are we going to be on day four, when the adrenaline of arriving has worn off and the tiredness underneath has surfaced? Is there one thing each day worth getting up for, and then genuine room around it?

A week with nine excursions in it produces nine good afternoons and one exhausted woman. A week with four produces four good afternoons and enough space for the unscheduled hours that people actually remember.

The reasons it lands as a ten

The trips women describe to me years later tend to share a handful of qualities. Someone else handled the logistics, so there was no low hum of decisions running underneath the days. There was a first morning slow enough to notice she had arrived. There was enough planned to stay interested and enough space to breathe. And she came home with the sense of having been somewhere, rather than having covered it.

None of that requires a mechanism claim to justify it. It requires a week built with room in it, which is a design problem, and design problems can be solved.

That is what I do from my desk, weeks before anyone gets on a plane.

Debra Orringer, MS, ACE-MES, ACSM-CEP, CIHC