What Intentional Travel Actually Means (And How to Practice It)
Presence looks like this.
Intentional travel means choosing why you're going before you decide where — naming what you want to release, and what you want to come home carrying instead, so the trip has somewhere to actually land. It's not a caption. It's not a vibe. It's a practice, and it's one I return to before every single trip I take, whether I'm leading a group of women to Bali or slipping away for a long weekend on my own.
Here's the difference, as I see it. A buzzword gets stamped on a photo and forgotten by the time the plane touches down. A practice changes how you move through the actual trip and, if you let it, how you move through your actual life once you're back home.
And it doesn't matter what kind of trip it is. Whether it's a solo trip, a family trip, or an getaway with your girlfriends, travel helps you shift your perspective and see more of yourself. The form changes. The effect doesn't.
Where this started for me
I started asking myself the intention question years ago, long before it became something I built into every Moonglade experience. It wasn't dramatic. There was no cinematic airport epiphany. It was smaller than that, a quiet noticing that the trips where I'd actually sat with why I was going, what I wanted to release and what I wanted to come home carrying instead, were the ones that actually changed something in me. The trips I just showed up for, distracted, still tethered to my inbox? Those were nice. They weren't transformative. There's a real difference between the two, and most people never get taught it.
So now, before every group experience I lead, I ask my travelers the same question I ask myself: what's your intention for this?
This time, with our Bali group, I asked it on our pre-travel call. And what happened next is the reason I'm writing this at all.
We didn't compare notes. We still said the same things.
Sixteen women, on one call, with zero prompting from each other and almost every single one of them reached for the same handful of words. Present. Renew. Restore.
One woman is coming off the hardest stretch of her career, the kind of years that wear a person down in ways that don't always show. Her intention wasn't complicated. She wants to let it go — actually let it go, not "a little bit" — and come home without dragging any of it back through customs with her.
Another had just moved her youngest into college. She didn't love the phrase "empty nest", her house doesn't feel empty to her, just different but she was clear that this trip was her way of reclaiming time she'd spent years pouring into everyone else, and stepping into whatever her next chapter looks like.
One woman, a therapist by profession, laughed at herself a little as she admitted she's the type who wants every hour scheduled, every excursion booked weeks in advance. This time, she said, she's practicing the opposite, saying yes to whatever the day brings instead of engineering it in advance.
Another described herself as someone deeply comfortable in her own company, traveling solo but surrounded by women she already considers friends. Her intention wasn't about needing to unwind so much as wanting to go deeper — with herself, and with the room — and carry that back into her everyday life.
And our very own, Bali host and Travel Advisor, Natasha Washington said something that's stayed with me since. Being that far from home, that far from her routine, forced her into a kind of presence nothing else in her life demands of her. No expectations. Just her and the moment directly in front of her. She told us that feeling followed her home the first time and quietly rewired how she moves through her regular days. That's not something you pick up at a gift shop.
Awakening Soul Wellness Retreat in Costa Rica
Pop culture is catching up to this. Tracee Ellis Ross just brought Solo Traveling with Tracee Ellis Ross back for a second season on the Roku Channel — three new countries, same underlying message she's built the whole show around: enjoying her own company while she unplugs and takes it all in. It's the same permission we're talking about here. Hers just comes with better lighting and a bigger suitcase.
How to actually set your own travel intention
You don't need a group trip or a travel advisor to try this — you need about ten honest minutes before you pack a single bag.
Name what you're tired of carrying. Be specific. Not "stress," but the actual thing — the job, the season, the role you've been playing for everyone else.
Ask what you actually want to come home with instead. Rest, clarity, connection, a decision you've been avoiding — whatever it is, name it before you leave, not somewhere over the ocean.
Write it down. One sentence. Keep it somewhere you'll actually see it — your notes app, the inside of your passport case, wherever.
Say it out loud to at least one other person. Something happens when an intention leaves your head and enters a room. It becomes real in a way a private thought doesn't.
Let the trip surprise you. The point isn't to force the intention into every single moment — it's to give the trip permission to actually deliver on it.
Even Oprah's saying it now. Oprah Daily recently devoted a full issue to the idea of transformational travel — the kind of signal that tells you this isn't a niche wellness idea anymore. It's a shift the whole industry is naming out loud.
Here's what I keep coming back to
Not one of the women on our call needed convincing that she was overdue for rest. She already knew that. What she needed was a reason, a room, and a group of other women doing the exact same work, to actually take it instead of talking herself out of it again.
That's the part of this job that has nothing to do with flights or hotel blocks, even though I book plenty of both. My work as a intentional travel coach, is building the container. The right destination, the right pace, the right group of women around the table, so that whatever someone is carrying has somewhere to land, and whatever she's hoping to find actually has room to show up.
If any of this is stirring something in you, our 2027 destinations are already taking shape — join the waitlist here to be first to know when we share the details.
If you've ever felt like you needed permission to actually rest instead of just being physically somewhere else while your mind stayed exactly where you left it — consider this that permission. We've got more of these experiences coming in 2027, in destinations I can't wait to tell you more about. I'd love for your intention to be one of the ones we get to hold space for next.