Just unveiled in The Future of Wellness: 2025 Trends report, our new trend “Analog Wellness” argues that the online world’s relentless marketing manipulations, disinformation and division campaigns have now gone too far. We predict that 2025 will be the year that more people get aggressive about logging off—in life and in travel. Digital detox vacations have been growing in popularity for years, are their rise is accelerating. These getaways often involve limited WiFi and even locked-up phones. Digital detox travel is now so mainstream that this week’s new season of The White Lotus comically represented it as a de rigueur policy at the Thai wellness resort.
Analog Travel: A New Travel Trend More hotels and resorts are not only helping people log off but helping them analog-on. They are experimenting with old-school, pre-digital tech and tools, and various analog experiences like arts and crafts, to fill the digital void. It’s been well covered how younger generations globally have been obsessed with analog tech—retro cameras, vinyl listening bars, dumb phones, vintage typewriters, paper books, analog over smart watches—you name it. Our trend also dives into the incredible growth in structured, super-social analog clubs and communities. From social ceramics clubs to reading parties set to live music to old-school board game playing clubs—people are gathering to craft, read, play, listen to music and learn with others. These new, grassroots analog “salons” are remaking night life and the very idea of wellness. Giving wellness businesses competition as the hot new “third spaces.”
Can analogue living cure digital burnout in 2025?– Wallpaper This Wallpaper wellness report is devoted to the increasingly contradictory wellness market GWS outlined in its 2025 trends report. In travel, you have the boom in medical-longevity and biohacking clinic-resorts (all those concierge doctors and diagnostics), such as Chenot Palace Weggis in Switzerland. On the other hand, there’s an equally powerful hunger for anti-tech analog destinations, such as Ibiza’s retreat Off-Season, designed to heal digital burnout with everything from sound healing to connecting with farm animals. Or the Dutch movement Sanctum and its “Frequency Festivals” that have created a rabid following for the “communal euphoria” they unleash with their unplugged part-silent-disco, part-mindfulness experiences––that leave people weeping.
This article explores how more hotels and resorts are leaning into analog amenities and activities to help guests be far more present. Hotel Ranga in Iceland offers guests a full “analog menu” with playing cards, games, disposable cameras, coloring books of local folklore, and paper maps. At San Diego’s Lakehouse Resort, the “Unplugged Sail Club” visitors get an analog experience on boats with binoculars, bird-watching guidebooks, fishing poles, board games, Polaroid cameras and a guitar (to replace Spotify).
One of the NYT’s main travel predictions for 2025: more tour operators and hospitality brands will offer “digital detox” retreats where travelers opt into an internet-free environment, often in nature—and with more destinations featuring completely off-the-grid experiences. Some are simply about digital disconnection, such as the Logout Livenow travel agency in Sardinia organizing vacations with a “zero technology” mantra, while more, like Unplugged’s UK cabins, swap the phone for analog tech like radios, board games and Polaroid cameras.
This new article covers just one rising aspect of the trend: travelers rejecting running from place to place to take hundreds of throwaway photos to instead take up sketching and watercolor painting, as a way to radically slow down and appreciate their destinations.
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