The Unrepeatable: Turning travel into something lived

As summer comes to an end for one half of the globe, a familiar conversation is playing out in some of the world’s most popular destinations: too many visitors, too much pressure and, in some places, local people asking whether tourism has gone too far.

Part of the problem is that more of us are being drawn to the same places, in search of the same experiences.

Open the camera roll from your last summer trip and compare it with a stranger’s. There’s a decent chance you’ll find the same blue domed Greek church, the same stretch of Mexican coastline or the same streets in an Italian hill town.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to see beautiful places. I’ve spent most of my career in travel and I still want to see them too, but I do wonder whether, in our pursuit of the perfect holiday, we’ve become a little too good at reproducing somebody else’s.

We can now discover almost anywhere, research everything before we arrive and see exactly what other people did when they got there. Even going “off the beaten track” has become something we can search for.

That phrase used to conjure up a particular kind of traveller: backpackers, hikers and overlanders heading somewhere windswept most of us had never heard of. Today, very little is truly hidden as an isolated beach or tiny restaurant can be filmed, posted and seen by millions of people before the week is out.

Technology has opened up the world in ways that would have been unimaginable when I started working in travel, and it’s made me think differently about what makes a trip special. Perhaps it isn’t finding somewhere nobody else knows about or visiting the latest “must see” destination, but enjoying somewhere in a way that couldn’t quite be repeated or replicated.

When TrustedHousesitters was founded 16 years ago, it didn’t set out to change the way people travel. The idea was much more practical: to give pet parents the freedom to go away knowing their pets were being cared for at home, while giving animal lovers the chance to travel somewhere new and enjoy the company of a pet.

But, for the people in our community, the experience of travel did change. Staying in someone’s home and caring for their pet gives you a different relationship with a place. Pets give shape to the day, draw you into local life and turn travel into something lived rather than simply observed.

A dog gets you out into a neighbourhood every morning. You discover the park because that’s where she wants to walk, not because somebody put it on a list. You start to recognise the same faces as you settle into the routines of the house and the local area.

These seem like small things, but travel is often made meaningful by small things.

One of our team recently came back from a sit in Swansea with her seven year old son. They spent their days on the beaches of the Gower and exploring Wales’s castles. But the real story of the holiday was Lizzie, the Shiba they were looking after.

By the end of the week, her son had learned something about the responsibility of looking after an animal and had become completely attached to her. Lizzie shaped the rhythm of their days and, in doing so, shaped their experience of the place.

Meanwhile, another family was able to go away knowing that Lizzie was being cared for in her own home. None of this required finding an undiscovered destination, a hidden location or the best photo opp on the internet. Swansea isn’t a secret, but their experience of it was unlike anyone else’s. That started with two families who had never met being prepared to trust one another.

That, to me, is what remains remarkable about TrustedHousesitters. A sit begins somewhere in the world roughly every two minutes, but no two can ever be quite the same. Different people, different homes, different pets and different places create something that can’t be packaged in advance.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons 97% of our members tell us TrustedHousesitters has improved their lives. And as travel becomes ever easier to discover, plan and share, I think there’s something rather special about an experience that still belongs entirely to the people who have it.

Further reading

• Overtourism is real: A conversation with our Head of ESG
• France beyond Paris: Destinations off the beaten path
• Top 10 Labor Day weekend getaways in the US
• 2 strangers, 1 home. How the trust actually works
• Zurich beyond the landmark: Tapping into local rhythms