Creative Retreats Are Replacing Party Trips for Gen Z

The classic young-person vacation used to mean cheap flights, hostel bunks, and a camera roll full of nights out. A growing share of young travelers is now booking something very different: trips built around pottery wheels, paintbrushes, and pasta dough. According to new survey data from the retreat booking platform BookRetreats, 73% of Gen Z travelers want creative retreats built around a hands-on hobby or skill — part of a wider move toward so-called "analog travel" that is quietly reshaping what a holiday is for.

The numbers behind the shift are striking. The platform's State of Retreats report, based on a decade of booking data and a survey of 1,040 U.S. travelers conducted between December 2025 and January 2026, found that creative retreats are among the fastest-growing retreat categories this year, with demand led by younger travelers. Nearly two thirds of U.S. travelers — 65% — say they are interested in joining one, while 64% plan to join a retreat of some kind in the next 12 months, driven by rest, mental health, and burnout. The message for the travel industry is that creative retreats are no longer a niche product.

Burnout Is the Push; Making Things Is the Pull

For Gen Z travelers, the motivations are clear. Rest and relaxation tops the list at 76%, followed by recovering from stress and burnout — a reason that skews sharply by generation, cited by 45% of Gen Z but just 15% of boomers. Mental health support sits at 35% and adventure at 26%. The backdrop is a generation spending an estimated 6 hours and 27 minutes a day on their phones; the survey found digital devices have made it harder for around 23% of Gen Z to connect with others. Worldwide, Google searches for "burnout" have tripled since 2020.

"What we're seeing is a generation that's grown up on screens now choosing to spend their holidays doing the opposite," said Sean Kelly, co-founder of the booking platform, pointing to cooking, painting, reading, and pottery as activities that demand full attention. As he put it, for many younger travelers, a week working with their hands is becoming more restorative than a week on a sunbed.

Cooking tops the wish list. Global searches for cooking retreats have surged 394% in the past year, and 53% of Gen Z travelers interested in creative retreats want to learn to cook on one — trading restaurant reservations for kitchen time, with meals taught by local chefs and ingredients pulled from the soil outside. More than 40% are drawn to painting and drawing retreats, while 28% say they would join a retreat just to read and roughly a quarter would sign up to sew and knit.

What Creative Retreats Actually Look Like

The industry is already reshaping itself around the demand. According to wellness travel coverage by 4Hoteliers, tour companies are building analog adventures where phones get locked up and travelers are handed printed maps and old-school alarm clocks instead. The United Kingdom's Unplugged cabins supply guests with paper maps, Polaroid cameras, books, and board games. Resorts are going further: the Royal Mansour in Marrakesh runs embroidery and calligraphy workshops, the Lake Austin Spa Resort in Texas offers a "Creative Rx" program of painting and craft classes, and operators now sell knitting holidays on Scotland's Fair Isle and art therapy retreats in Crete.

None of this appeared overnight. The arc of the trend is visible in search data: in January 2026, Google Trends showed searches for "analog bag" at an all-time high while "cell phone accessories for going analog" was a breakout query, up 5,000%, as reported by PureWow; by spring, the search giant noted "digital boundaries" had hit an all-time high; in May, the survey put hard numbers on demand for creative retreats; and since then, U.S. searches for "analog travel" itself are up 864% since January. Slow-travel guides note the pattern works best when the destination does the unplugging — picking places where the signal simply fades, rather than relying on willpower alone.

Neuroscience offers a plausible mechanism. As reported by the travel site Yes Go Great, neuroscientist Nicole Vignola argues that stepping away from digital dependence lets the brain's "default mode network" — the circuitry active during rest and daydreaming — recover. "If you don't tend to it," she says, "it becomes a place you don't want to be." Fittingly, many travelers are planning their creative retreats the old way: guidebooks, magazines, and friends' recommendations instead of AI itineraries.

The Catch: Presence Is Becoming a Luxury Good

There is a wrinkle. The report itself frames intentional unplugging as "the new luxury in wellness travel" — and luxury is the operative word. A week of throwing clay in rural Portugal or learning pasta from an Italian chef costs far more than the hostel-and-nightlife trip it replaces, putting the most restorative version of this trend out of reach for many of the burnt-out young workers driving the demand. Some travel writers argue the creative retreats boom is wellness marketing in a homespun costume: a phone-free week that still costs a month's rent.

The format has skeptics on practical grounds, too. According to the slow-travel site JetMeAway, a retreat that confiscates your phone in a city with full signal outside the gate is fighting willpower the entire stay — the destinations that actually reset people are the ones where the geography does the work, like dead-zone valleys and trail towns where the bars simply vanish.

Still, the core idea is leaking into cheaper, everyday forms. According to the American Bazaar's coverage of the Gen Z "luddite" movement, book clubs, film photography, vinyl records, and handwritten journals are gaining ground among younger consumers seeking experiences they see as more authentic. Analysts note the same impulse is remaking nightlife, with grassroots analog clubs — ceramics nights, reading parties set to live music, board game evenings — emerging as new third spaces.

For travelers who cannot swing a full retreat, the data suggests a middle path: book creative retreats or simply build trips around doing, not just seeing. An American Express travel report found that 79% of millennials and Gen Z are likely to seek out local workshops or destination-specific activities on their trips, and three in four believe skills gained while traveling stay with them longer than any material souvenir, according to Reward Flight Finder's roundup of 2026 travel trends. A half-day pottery class or a cooking workshop in a new city delivers a version of the same reset at a fraction of the cost — the same logic behind Gen Z's embrace of offline third spaces closer to home, from the mahjong boom to run clubs.

Whether creative retreats are a lasting redefinition of the vacation or a pricey detour on the way back to the beach, the direction of travel is clear. About 49% of U.S. travelers plan to spend money on a retreat in the coming year — ranking it ahead of spa treatments and supplements as a wellness priority — and the industry shorthand is that travel is shifting from time off to time spent. It is a shift playing out across IRL Life more broadly: for a generation raised on screens, the most radical souvenir may be a skill.