I’M OFF ON HOLIDAY - BUT WHO KNOWS WHERE? WILL MY ‘MYSTERY TRAVEL’ EXPERIMENT END IN DELIGHT OR DISAPPOINTMENT?

I do not, if i can help it, fly before noon. I do not book airlines that charge a fee for a glass of water. And I do not have any particular interest in Romania, a country I mainly associate with cold-war gymnastics and Andrew Tate. And yet there I was at Luton at 7.30am on a Sunday morning, blearily scanning the departures board for Bucharest. I would not have chosen any of this – and that was precisely the point. In the name of letting go and embracing surprise, I had outsourced the planning of this entire holiday to a mystery travel agency. A few weeks before, I had filled out a brief survey on my preferences – ranking my relative interest in historic sites, nature, standup paddleboarding and scuba diving – and left the rest up to fate, AKA a company called Journee.

I was drawn to this concept for a few reasons. Mystery travel is increasingly popular with millennials like me, and I wanted to know if it lived up to the hype. My last couple of trips involved so many late-night sessions in front of Booking.com, so many hours browsing Instagram recommendations and Lonely Planet listicles, that by the time I was squirting shampoo and conditioner into 100ml containers, I was not so much eagerly anticipating a getaway as anxiously wondering whether I’d optimised the itinerary. Then, if I did have a disappointing experience abroad, I felt like it was my own fault: I must not have done enough research.

They recommend travellers maximise the drama by opening the envelope at the airport, but my resolve broke somewhere around Watford

In the run-up to my trip, I was optimistic. I blocked off a long weekend, laid out a few summery outfits (Journee emailed me a weather forecast and a packing list), and that was it. I enjoyed breezily telling people that I wouldn’t be available in late May: “I’ll be away.” “Where?” “Don’t know.” The sealed envelope with my flights, destination and hotel information lay on the dining room table like a wrapped present under a Christmas tree.

Journee recommends travellers maximise the drama by opening the envelope at the airport, but my resolve broke somewhere around Watford. I needed a boost; I’d been up since 6am. When I finally ripped open the letter and learned that I was en route to Bucharest and Brasov, I was too tired to register much emotion. Trying to psych myself up, I searched “Romania” on the New York Times website and started skimming the first essay. “I come from Romania,” I read, “a country as insignificant as it seems cursed, a place that has been submerged in failure for as long as it has been in existence.” I decided not to do any more research, and turned my phone to airplane mode. In keeping with the theme of restriction, Wizz Air spared me choices: between coffee and tea (I was offered neither); and between prioritising my own comfort and that of the person behind me (the seat did not recline).

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In our hyper-curated world, young adults are increasingly paying not to choose. Millennial consumers opt for mystery boxes of beauty products, sex toys, alcohol, dog treats, cheeses and tea. The dating app Thursday limits swiping to one day of the week, while Blindlee blurs out users during an initial video call. The Chinese toy company Pop Mart, whose signature product is a “blind box” of unidentified figurines, is expanding internationally after bringing in $871m (£674m) in revenue in 2023. Bookshops sell their wares in brown paper packages that obscure the title. But mystery travel agencies like Journee in London, Pittsburgh-based Pack Up + Go, and Magical Mystery Tours in Chicago are taking the idea the furthest, offering surprise trips across Europe and the US.

Researchers have long believed that people prefer certainty. “It’s one of the most established facts in the literature on psychology and decision-making,” says University of Southern California marketing professor Eva Buechel. A classic study on risk aversion found people were willing to pay more for a $50 gift voucher than they were for an equal chance of winning either a $50 or $100 one.

By the time you’ve decided where to go and sorted your accommodation, you’re exhausted. And there’s constant second-guessing: did I get it right?; did I overpay?

But last year, in a paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, Buechel and her colleague Ruoou Li published a study that questioned this widespread assumption about certainty. From a sample of 150 people, Buechel and Li found that most preferred to receive a mystery product – such as a snack, a stress ball, a rental car or an ice-cream flavour – rather than choosing one themselves. This was true even when the non-mystery item was more desirable than the mystery one. (Li and Buechel determined a product’s level of desirability by a variety of factors, including sales data.) The authors concluded that consumers consider surprise to be its own form of value. “In this case, people are seemingly seeking out uncertainty,” Buechel says. She and Li coin a term for this phenomenon: mysterious consumption.

Journee grew out of the founders’ frustration with the number of options on sites like Skyscanner, Expedia and Airbnb. They wanted to offer an antidote to information overload and relief from the expectation that we can, and therefore should, spend hours scouring listings and reviews online. “By the time you’ve decided where to go and sorted your accommodation, you’re exhausted,” says cofounder and avid traveller Ed Tribe. “You’ve got to sift through all this information.” All of those decisions can even haunt the trip itself. “There’s this constant second-guessing: did I get it right?; did I overpay?” Journee starts with a questionnaire, during which you can set your budget (the minimum is £545 per person for a four-day trip, or £625 for solo travellers, although the eventual cost may go below that if the destination is cheaper).

Katie Truesdell, owner of Magical Mystery Tours, agrees that tourists are “paralysed” by the amount of information available. “I’ve heard people say that they just won’t go on a trip because they can’t deal with it,” she says.

An excess of options can backfire. In a classic experiment, business professor Sheena Iyengar and Stanford psychologist Mark Lepper set up a tasting booth at a grocery store in Menlo Park, California. At certain times, the booth offered six kinds of jam; at others, 24 varieties were on display. Iyengar and Lepper were surprised to discover that shoppers who encountered two-dozen types of jam were 10 times less likely to make a purchase: instead, they lingered at the booth, grew overwhelmed and then left. Iyengar and Lepper’s study was carried out in 2000. Today, the idea of choosing among from 24 kinds of jam almost seems quaint; Amazon alone offers thousands.

It’s not just with groceries that we have an unprecedented number of options: it’s with everything. “We, as a generation, have had more choice in what we do, in what we study, in where we work, where we travel, than any other generation before us,” says Eliza Filby, historian and author of Generation Shift and the forthcoming Inheritocracy. And we’re so exhausted by it that we’re imposing boundaries on ourselves. Millennials are replacing smartphones with dumbphones, and signing up for digital detoxes. The holiday company Unplugged has a growing network of 23 tech-free cabins in the British countryside; luxury travel agency Get Lost offers the chance to disconnect in desolate environments all over the world. “In the age of overload,” says Filby, we’re looking for “unfreedom.” Mysterious consumption fits into the digital detox trend – allowing travellers to skip the online vetting of every possible attraction.

Mystery travel may hold particular appeal for time-strapped gig workers and hustling millennials (most of Journee’s customers, according to Tribe, are in the 25-35 age range). Lydia Okoibhole, a 27-year-old global health researcher who signed up for her first surprise trip last March, was more interested in the promise of efficiency than in the element of surprise. Okoibhole, who lives in London, regularly visits family in Nigeria, conducts research on diabetes in Ghana, and enjoys recreational travel around Europe. But, she says, “organising a trip always takes so much time”. Using Journee meant she could “just continue working”. She booked a five-day trip, indicating that she wanted a location safe for ethnic minorities and LGBT travellers, and ended up bathing in thermal springs and dining at vegan-friendly restaurants in the north of Greece.

Like Okoibhole, 30-year-old Pack Up + Go customer Kathleen Shirley has a stressful, emotionally demanding job. As a funeral director in Pennsylvania, she often works nights and weekends, comforting grieving families and arranging visitations. “It’s not just a nine-to-five job,” she says. “People die all hours of the day.” Shirley loves her job – she decided to join the industry when she was only 12 – but it comes with unpredictable hours, emotional strain and constant reminders of the brevity of life. “I feel like I give a lot at work, and so I also want to have experiences that I enjoy,” she says. “I want to see the world around us.” Pack Up + Go allowed her to make the most of her limited time off; she spent a hassle-free weekend in Denver, Colorado, hiking in the Rocky Mountains, and sampling the restaurants and breweries. Shirley wouldn’t have thought to plan a trip to Denver, but she enjoyed guessing her destination and discovering a new place. “In a world where you can learn anything at any time, it’s refreshing not to know,” says Ed Tribe.

Travelling to a random place or receiving a random book is an antidote to how algorithms overdetermine everything

In travel and entertainment, surprise is now scarce. Netflix, Spotify and Google Maps serve us TV shows, music and coffee shops similar to those we’ve already enjoyed. Thanks to smartphone GPS, we rarely get lost or stumble on a scenic but inefficient route. “We crave surprise because so much digital content has become moulded to our tastes, it’s harder to find something totally outside your frame of reference,” says Kyle Chayka, author of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. “So travelling to a random place or receiving a random book is an antidote to how algorithms overdetermine everything.” AI is exacerbating the situation, drawing on reams of data to deliver highly personalised recommendations. “Our future is far less surprising and more predictable than it’s ever been,” psychologist LeeAnn Renninger writes in Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected, noting that we have “more information than we can ever possibly process”.

But anticipating a surprise can lead to let-downs. “Our hedonic reactions to these events are usually amplified,” says Buechel, co-author of the study on mysterious consumption. “If a positive thing comes as a surprise, then we feel more elated. If a bad thing comes as a surprise, then we’re more unhappy about it.” As people look forward to the big reveal, they “start to engage in wishful thinking”, warns her colleague Ruoou Li, assistant professor of marketing at the University of North Texas. “They think about what they are going to get, and they focus on the things they like.” In Li and Buechel’s study, those who opted for the surprise snacks or songs tended to end up disappointed, scoring lower on levels of satisfaction than those who made their own decision. When, a couple weeks before my departure, Journee sent me the first of a series of clues– “People in your destination speak a language much older than English” – I fantasised about going to the Basque Country or Greece. (Of course, my £750 budget from Journee was presumably a factor in the itinerary they designed.)

In 2019, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag delivered a confessional speech that became a millennial rallying cry. “I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning,” she admits, her face contorting with desire. She yearns to be told, among other things, “what to eat, what to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for”. With its packing list (featuring toothpaste, passport, comfortable shoes), prepaid tickets and handy list of vegetarian-friendly restaurants, my Journee trip was, in certain ways, like a Fleabag wish-fulfilment fantasy. And there was indeed something comforting about following an itinerary that someone else had planned, like doing a dot-to-dot – or being a child.

I couldn’t shake a kind of aimlessness, a sense that I wasn’t sure why I was there. That I hadn’t chosen this, and was therefore less invested

And it’s not that the trip was a bust. I visited a fascinating museum of communism and listened, rapt, to my tour guide’s stories of waking at dawn to queue for bread rations in the 1980s. I went to a lovely, light-filled bookstore and bought a copy of Dracula, which I read on my pre-booked train to Brasov – alternating the tale of the vampire count (inspired by Romanian folklore) with glances at the misty forests and wildflowers outside my window.

But I couldn’t shake a kind of aimlessness, a sense that I wasn’t quite sure why I was there. That I hadn’t chosen this, and was therefore less invested in it. It reminded me of certain random dates I went on in my early 20s, before I started applying more rigorous criteria to my Tinder searches. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the men who sipped IPAs across from me: it was just that I didn’t know why, of all possible places to be, I was there.

In a cab to the airport at the end of the trip, my taxi driver asked if I had been to Therme.

“Therme?” I hadn’t heard of it.

“The biggest spa in Europe.” Apparently, it was a cheap cab ride from where I’d been staying. It’s the kind of thing I would have loved – and would surely have known about if I had done even 10 minutes of research. Now, I wanted to kick … something. It was an odd feeling. I had no one to blame: not a delinquent travel partner, not even myself. But this was small consolation when, in the back of the cab, I saw photos on my phone of the outdoor thermal pool and swim-up bar. Next time, I’m making my own decisions.

• Alice’s trip was provided by Journee

2024-08-03T13:11:34Z dg43tfdfdgfd