How to Give the Gift of Travel

This travel journal is part of our TravelStore Passport Diaries Podcast. Watch the full episode below, and for more episodes, visit our Passport Diaries Podcast page or follow us on your favorite podcast platform.

Excuse us for being presumptive, but since you are reading this article, we think it’s safe to say you (or someone in your life) loves to travel.

If that sounds about right, then we want to help alleviate some of the consternation around gifting the ultimate gift: travel!

We get it: there are a lot of logistics involved in planning a trip for someone. It gets especially complicated when you are trying to keep the trip hush hush. Several of the questions we get asked regularly when people are just starting to brainstorm a gifted trip are:

• “How much of the trip should I plan?”
• “Do I have to book EVERYTHING in advance?”
• “What if they don’t like the hotel?”
• “How do I do a surprise upgrade?”
• “HELP I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START, BUT MY WIFE/SON/FRIEND/BROTHER/AUNT/DOG-WALKER LOVES TO TRAVEL AND I FINALLY WANT TO GET THEM SOMETHING THEY’LL ACTUALLY LOVE THIS YEAR INSTEAD OF ANOTHER KITCHENAID OR SET OF GOLF CLUBS”

You can relax…we have all the answers 😊 Well, 99% of the answers, but that’s still pretty darn good.

Our advisors have planned all sorts of surprise travel for their clients. Collectively, we have probably done every kind of gift trip you can think of. Michelle Keith works frequently with honeymooners and specializes in planning destination weddings. She has several stories on how to surprise and delight the special person in your life or someone getting ready to tie the knot. She works her magic and her connections all year long to bring to life the travel gift ideas of mothers-in-law, siblings, and spouses. She also shares a great story about a group of girlfriends who go to a new destination together every year for a week. The catch? Only one member of the group knows where they’re going! Everyone else gets a brief packing list, a ticket, and shows up at the airport to depart for their surprise destination of the year. So, yeah – if anyone has experience pulling strings behind the scenes and crafting full-blown secret trip itineraries, it’s Michelle. As she says in our podcastP:

“Travel and experiences give you the feels – stuff does not.”

Julia Cadar shares a story about helping a mom surprise her kids at Christmas with a trip to Europe! The itinerary includes places like Italy and Paris, so to spice up the actual gift portion of the surprise, Mom is wrapping up clues in the shape of Christmas tree ornaments. As the kiddos open up a pizza ornament and an Eiffel tower ornament, they will decode the clues to discover a family trip across the pond is nigh!

Tanya Bryant has also done every kind of travel gift under the sun. She has curated a book with a full day-to-day itinerary for the trip of a lifetime that the recipient still calls her favorite trip ever to this day. She also shares what NOT to do: maybe if you are planning to gift a full trip to another country, just make sure the recipients actually WANT to go there. Or, if you want to surprise your insect-despising wife with a trip, just make sure it is to a place without a lot of multi-legged critters.

Word of advice: call your travel advisor before making big decisions – sometimes they know your spouse as well as you do!

Patrick Hinds also has a ton of experience putting together Honey Funds. These delightful wedding gift registries are different than your run-of-the-mill wish lists of pots, pans, and tricked-out toasters. Instead, Patrick helps a newlywed couple craft their post-nuptial dream vacation. This might include luxury hotel stays, unique excursions (like swimming with manta rays in the Maldives or a local cooking class in Bali), spa treatments, dinner at a top-of-the-charts restaurant, etc. Contributors to the Honey Fund can chip in as much or as little as they like towards a specific piece of the trip or add to the overall trip fund.

“Instead of having a registry for cooking utensils and what not, they can actually have items on their trip that people can kindly gift to them. Whether that ends up being a tour, a ‘drink on me’, or even a hotel stay… it’s always fun to see just how extravagant the trip can end up being when people are being very generous.” shares Patrick.

As you can see, our advisors have planned a thing or two when it comes to gifting travel of any size.

But all of this begs the question: Why does it seem like people are looking to gift travel more often these days?

“As a mom of two small kids, they have enough stuff” says Tanya Bryant, our General Manager of Groups & Leisure. “We’re surrounded by stuff; they don’t need more of it. Taking them on a trip – Hawaii, Colorado, or Ireland, I’ve done all three with my kids now – they remember that so much more than whatever they’re going to open up for a birthday or a holiday. It’s the memory of it that sticks a lot longer.”

Julia Cadar thinks the explosion of social media also has something to do with the increased interest in gifting and receiving travel: “Everyone’s got this keeping-up-with-the-Jones’s; you see so-and-so going on an African safari and its like, ‘What do I want to do? I want to out-do that.’ So, there’s a bit of showing off on your social media and getting the photos and the experiences more than showing off your, I don’t know, new boots.”

“I feel like since the outset of COVID, we’ve become a lot more experience-focused than materialistic”

adds Patrick. “I do feel that whole environment focused us and made us not take travel for granted as much anymore. You definitely see people travel with a lot more enthusiasm these days, and I can’t think of anything better to gift in my opinion.”

What do you think? Is travel the best gift in the world? We think so too. And when you need help figuring out how to go about doing it for your loved ones, we are here to help from one sandy beach stop to the next.

Check out our full Passport Diaries episode on the gift of travel for more great stories! Stick around to the end (or skip ahead) and hear where our travel advisors would choose to go in 2026 if they were gifted an all-expense paid trip anywhere in the world. Their answers might surprise you!