Michelin-starred meals and massages will always have their place. But newlyweds are now seeking something much simpler: to disappear
After getting engaged, OWN bride Rachel barely gave her honeymoon a second thought, assuming it would be easy to organise nearer the time. “By the time we’d finished planning the wedding I was exhausted,” she tells 374. “The honeymoon became yet another thing to organise. I had complete decision fatigue and found myself gravitating towards overly aesthetic options, before eventually asking myself: do I actually want to stay here, or do I just think this would look good on Instagram?”
The ‘going dark’ honeymoon is the latest evolution of the digital detox, with a growing number of newlyweds choosing to spend the first days of married life offline, in a bubble all of their own.
“Couples are coming to us and being quite explicit about wanting to feel unreachable for a stretch of time” says Mary Cropper, Travel Expert and Travel & Leisure A-List advisor at Black Tomato. “A honeymoon is one of the few moments in modern life where couples want to be fully present with each other, and they're increasingly aware of how hard that is to protect.”
For Rachel and her partner, the idea of a ‘digital detox' felt incredibly freeing: “The wedding had been photographed from every angle - I didn’t feel the need to document the honeymoon too. It was just ours.”
Mary Cropper agrees, “There's a cultural shift happening around intentionality in travel more broadly. People aren't just choosing where to go, they're choosing how they want to feel, and what they want to come back having experienced together.”
If disappearing from social media sounds like your idea of luxury, here are nine hotels and travel experiences that come with a ‘do not disturb’ guarantee.
