All those stories about group tours, hostel friends, and the magic of getting lost in conversation? Great for some people. Terrible for others.

For decades, you’ve been sold a version of travel that rewards charisma, spontaneity, and the ability to chat up strangers in four languages before lunch. You’ve been told the best moments happen clinking glasses at a wine tasting with strangers, locking arms during a folk dance lesson, or when you “suddenly become best friends” with a guy named Paolo from Brazil.

And maybe that works for you.

But for millions of travelers, it doesn’t.

Because travel —like conversation, like love, like life— isn’t one-size-fits-all. And personality matters more than anyone wants to admit.

The Extroverted Traveler Myth

Travel hasn’t always been sold as a social sport. Before budget flights, it was a luxury for the few. Then came the post-’60s backpacker boom and the rise of Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, and other gospel-spreaders of collective adventure. The message was everywhere: You’re not doing it right unless you’re doing it together. The subtext: your worth as a traveler is proportional to the number of strangers you’ve clinked bottles with.

Even great travel teachers who started in that era —Rick Steves comes to mind— lean on the power of shared meals, chats with locals, and group tours. These are wonderful for some travelers, but they also reinforce the idea that travel must be social.

When social media arrived, Instagram poured jet fuel on the “travel is connection” narrative —always smiling, always surrounded by friends you met five minutes ago. Travel companies and influencers doubled down, selling “immersion” as a group sport: walking tours, cooking classes, communal dinners, “live like a local” homestays. Group package tours march you from sight to sight. Voluntourism frames service as a bonding exercise. Even “adventure” travel assumes you’ll raft, trek, or climb with a pack of strangers. Now TikTok edits it all into a breathless loop—motion, music, people, repeat.

The message is clear: if you’re not meeting people or seeing as much as you can, you’re doing it wrong.

American culture is uniquely good at exporting this message. The U.S. scores high on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions for individualism and low for uncertainty avoidance—translation: we love bold personalities who dive into the unfamiliar without hesitation. That mindset heavily influences our travel storytelling. A good traveler, by this standard, is a human Golden Retriever: friendly, high-energy, and ready to play fetch with anyone.

Even our travel heroes seem to prove the point. Anthony Bourdain, striding through a market in Vietnam or sharing a table in Beirut, looked like the ultimate extrovert. But by many accounts, Bourdain was an introvert. In interviews and in the words of people who knew him, he described struggling with the public-facing demands of his work. He learned to perform charisma the way a stage actor projects their voice—convincing, practiced, and exhausting. Off camera, he often retreated to quiet spaces, recharged alone, and guarded his inner life fiercely.

We rarely see that part in travel media. Instead, we get a performance we’re told to emulate, without the context that it’s not sustainable —or even authentic— for everyone.

Psychologists like Susan Cain (Quiet) and researchers on overstimulation point out that introverts process external stimuli more deeply, and as a result, tire more quickly in loud, high-interaction settings. Layer in the sensory overload of travel —foreign languages, unfamiliar foods, chaotic transit systems— and what’s billed as “immersive” can easily turn into burnout. Decision fatigue, culture shock, and social exhaustion aren’t moral failings; they’re natural responses.

Add American PTO math to the mix: the U.S. is the only OECD country without federally guaranteed paid vacation, and many workers average just two weeks a year. No wonder trips turn into checklists and there’s pressure to wring value from every minute. What often gets overlooked is that you don’t have to be doing something to enjoy a moment.

The post-pandemic picture makes this gap even clearer. After lockdowns, we sprinted into “revenge travel”—record airport volumes, once-in-a-decade summers. Then the sugar rush faded. Personality research shows extraversion dipped during the pandemic and didn’t snap fully back. People are choosing pace and control over perpetual mingling. That doesn’t make us broken. It just means the product being sold in our feeds no longer fits the customer.

But a countercurrent is gaining momentum—quiet travel, slow tourism, and serenity-focused experiences are becoming more visible. Some travelers now crave more remote destinations, where you can walk entire valleys alone, or take retreats in lodges designed for silence and reflection. Others seek quiet cabins in the mountains, off-season coastal towns, or minimalist wellness retreats built around the absence of noise rather than its celebration.

But not every place gets to stay that way. Instagram and TikTok have turned quiet corners into global “must-sees” overnight, until they’re so swamped with people, tripods, and ring lights that the atmosphere people came for no longer exists. And when those spaces vanish, travelers who thrive in quieter settings lose some of the few environments that truly suit them.

None of this should frame introversion as a flaw. In many cultures, like Sweden, where I currently live, it’s normal, even valued. The problem isn’t people, as 56.8% of people around the world prefer introversion; it’s the idea that travel must be performed at an extrovert’s volume. And that leaves millions of travelers, perhaps yourself included, wondering if they’re doing it wrong.

The Paradox

Here’s the irony: some of the travelers best equipped to truly observe, absorb, and reflect on a new place are the ones who are made to feel like they’re “doing it wrong.”

I like chatting, mingling, and exploring out loud. I can work at a café counter if I have to. Technically, I’m an ambivert—someone who swings between introversion and extroversion depending on the situation. I used to be more extroverted, but over time I’ve shifted, code-switching when I need to. Personality isn’t fixed; it changes with age, context, and what your energy demands from you. But I’ve also seen what introverted travelers —like my wife— bring to the table. She doesn’t need to bounce between strangers to feel connected. She can sit in a park for hours, watching the light change on a building’s façade, observing the rhythm of local life, and still learn an incredible amount about a place.

When we travel together, we often split up for part of the day. When I mention this to friends or family, it’s usually met with a scoff—“Why would you do that?”—as if traveling together means being attached at the hip and compromising how we both best enjoy it.

I wander, talk to people, poke my head into shops. She might stay in one place for hours, soaking in its atmosphere, or simply return to the hotel to rest and recharge. Either way, she comes back with a completely different sensory map. Both of us are traveling.

I’ve seen her joy in moments that would barely register for the “always on” traveler. She has no urge to collect a checklist of sights, just the handful that to her feel worth remembering.

Some of the world’s most perceptive travel writers pursue a style of travel that barely resembles what’s marketed to us. Paul Theroux’s lone journeys and Pico Iyer’s meditations on stillness aren’t built for group activities or constant socializing. They’re about patience, attention, and the long, quiet absorption of place.

This isn’t the kind of travel that fills an Instagram grid. It’s the kind that notices the rhythm of a street before dawn, the small kindness of a shopkeeper, or the way a city smells after rain—the details that give a destination its texture. It's the moments you don’t plan. The non-glamorous locales.

Recently, in Japan, my wife and I passed through Shibuya. Neon chaos, human traffic, the visual equivalent for an introvert of being hit in the head with a cymbal. After about an hour, I could see her shutting down from the overload, so we ducked into a ramen shop in a basement. It was another world: tiny cubbies, signs for silence, rattan curtains lifting just enough for the server to pass your bowl through, wooden tags to indicate your preferences so you didn’t need to speak. She went from a nightmare to a dream in minutes. Honestly, so did I.

That moment was the nexus for this piece—the realization that travel isn’t just about activity preferences, it’s about personality. It’s about finding the version of the world where you can breathe.

Reframing Travel

Travel doesn’t require a crowd. It doesn’t require conversation. It doesn’t even require courage—at least, not the chest-thumping, “quit your job and hit the road” kind.

Some of my most meaningful experiences have been solitary: on a self-drive safari watching animals without a guide explaining everything to me; cycling through a city as it went about its day. That’s why my recent hike through Liechtenstein (which I will highlight soon) felt so remarkable. The trail wound past storybook villages and Alpine meadows, but the pace was my own. No guide setting a stopwatch. No chatter breaking the rhythm. It wasn’t about avoiding people; it was about visiting a place without performance.

If the travel industry is serious about “immersion,” it needs to stop assuming immersion always means interaction. Sometimes it means the opposite—blending in, not standing out; listening instead of speaking; noticing without interrupting.

All is not lost. There’s a quiet countercurrent forming, and if you’ve been feeling out of step with the “always on” travel narrative, you’re not alone. Expedia’s Unpack ’25 highlights two trends: the Joy of Missing Out (JOMO) — which is planning quieter trips with friends and family instead of checking boxes, and the rise of Detour Destinations, in which 63% planned to choose a less-crowded locale for their next trip. This isn’t anti-social—it’s pro-sanity. It’s travel that matches your nervous system instead of frying it.

Travel is a tool for transformation —but only if it meets you where you are. You don’t have to match someone else’s energy to have a valid experience. You don’t have to collect friends like souvenirs. You don’t have to see everything.

You just have to be present in the way that works for you — even if it’s nothing like the version you’ve been sold.

And if that means you’ve been “traveling wrong” your whole life, the good news is you get to rewrite the script starting now.

My wife is just one example, but she’s far from alone — more people identify as introverts than extroverts, and that number is growing. If this piece reminded you of your own travels, or of someone you know, share it with them. The more we challenge the idea that there’s only one ‘right’ way to travel, the more space there is for everyone to move at their own pace.

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