gINKgo | The RARE Newsletter | Latest at RARE Part 2 | Vol 88 | Oct 2023

Previous Newsletter

THE PRIVILEGE OF EXPERIENTIAL TRAVEL

All Life is an experience. It shapes us and defines who we are in the end. Remember this childhood game? Name, Place, Animal, Thing; some of us went on to add fruit or food, movies and later even a brand to the list. To add more power to it, we would build all of it in a way that was linked. This connectedness, I believe, is the essence of tourism.

Travel gives us the privilege to choose an experience and mindful travel allows us to live with it for a longer time, transforming us in the process. When tourism moved from what we thought tourists should see of a country to understanding what they would like to see and how – experiential travel was established. I refuse to be cynical about the spread of experiential travel as random marketing jargon. It is for experience that we travel and the experience one seeks is a personal quest. Do we exclude monuments, performances, crafts, people or landscapes in search of the esoteric and extraordinary? Chosen consciously sights and stories become audio-visual backdrops of a compelling destination story. People and their stories are integral to experiencing a destination. In its best version experiential travel unleashes the full potential of a destination and that is what makes travel unforgettable.

Among new hotels and experiences, two boutique hotels in Nepal complete a trio to form a composite itinerary of Kathmandu and Chitwan along with our long-standing partner, Tiger Mountain Pokhara Lodge. Two stellar experiences – the award-winning Petrichor by TBY presently in Pondicherry and Kerala are all about community and climate resilient experiences, while we have a perfumier waiting to send you on an olfactory overload not far from Agra.

Shoba Rudra