The start of a new year always makes people a bit reflective. It’s a natural stopping point. We’ve finished the last year and are beginning the next. As we process the year behind, we dream of what’s to come.
For travelers, new years bring visions of new destinations, longer trips, and deeper connections. But it’s not just destinations and flights we can look forward to. New years also provide an opportunity to challenge how we travel.
New Year travel challenges are commitments to travel in a new way or to try something different on the road. Travel challenges are about growth, pushing our habits, routines, and perceptions to feel richer, more expansive, more connected, and more aligned with who we want to become.
Travel challenges are perfect for travelers of all levels. If you are new to travel, they can help you take baby steps out of your comfort zone. If you are a seasoned traveler, they are the way to break out of autopilot and design transformative travel experiences.
In this article, we’ll explain what New Year travel challenges are, why they matter, and how to design travel challenges that push you without overwhelming you. We’ll then walk you through a series of travel challenges you can take on in the year ahead.
These challenges range from mindset shifts to practical habits that can rewire how you approach the world as a traveler.
What are New Year Travel Challenges?
New Year travel challenges are intentional goals, actions, or commitments that shape how we travel. New Year travel challenges are less about where you go and more about how you behave when you’re there.
A New Year travel challenge could ask you to slow down, travel more sustainably, talk to more locals, spend less money, or overcome a fear. The challenge might be for a year, a single trip, or a particular season. What all travel challenges have in common is intention.
Travel challenges are not resolutions. They are flexible, adaptable, and based on curiosity rather than rules.
Why Set Travel Challenges at the Start of the Year?
We tend to do more reflecting at the start of the year. We question how we want our year to feel, how we want to spend our time, and how we want to prioritize. The new year is a perfect time to set travel challenges because we are already there.
Setting New Year travel challenges helps us:
Travel with intention
Break our travel habits
Learn about ourselves through travel
Make trips more memorable
Travel more in line with our values and lifestyle
Travel challenges also help us shift away from passive travel and toward engagement and creation. They help us move past the idea that travel is merely a thing we do, something we check off a list.
Instead, we use travel challenges to truly step into the places we visit, not just physically but emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.
Choosing Travel Challenges for Your Life
Travel challenges aren’t one size fits all. The best travel challenges for you are the ones that apply to your current life stage, travel level, and goals.
Consider a few questions before choosing travel challenges for the new year:
What parts of my travel experience are stagnant or feel repetitive?
What parts of travel make me anxious, shy, or closed off?
Do I want travel to feel more adventurous, relaxed, cheap, connected, or transformative?
What factors need I consider, such as time, budget, family, or other constraints?
Answering these questions will help you choose travel challenges that push your comfort zone without setting you up to fail or feel burnt out.
Challenge 1: Travel without a Detailed Itinerary
Most travelers make the mistake of becoming too itinerary-focused. Having an itinerary is essential, but detailed hour-by-hour schedules remove all of the spontaneity from travel.
Instead of microplanning every moment, use travel challenges as an excuse to relax your grip a bit on your trips. Design a loose itinerary with a few anchor points, and let the trip’s energy and rest of the itinerary emerge as you go.
Challenge 2: Travel slower than you think you should
We are a productivity-obsessed culture. We praise efficiency. We cram things into the weekends and vacations in order to feel productive.
Travel is a natural counter to this culture of productivity. Don’t try to see everything. Instead, linger, relax, rest, walk around, get lost, explore, and take up space in the places you visit.
Challenge 3: Travel on a Tighter Budget than Ever Before
Traveling on a budget is both a mindset and a skill. Pushing yourself to travel more cheaply is one of the best ways to rethink priorities, habits, and assumptions.
Challenge yourself to travel more lightly on your wallet. Learn to budget for travel, cook more, take local transit, stay at locally owned accommodation, and find free cultural experiences.
Budget travel is much more than frugality. It’s a set of principles and skills that can turn travel into something more meaningful.
Challenge 4: Face a Travel Fear
We all have travel fears. From flying to getting lost to missing a train to heights to using public transport to feeling alone.
Facing one of your travel fears can be a very powerful travel challenge. It’s important not to go too far out of your comfort zone. Start small and doable. You’ll still be taking a risk, but the goal is to feel the fear and do it anyway.
Challenge 5: Travel solo, even if it’s only for one trip
Solo travel is a fantastic way to level up your skills and travel experience. We’ve all heard the horror stories, the anxiety, and the fear.
Solo travel is like any other travel. Yes, there are moments of fear and anxiety, but they are also richly rewarding.
Make your New Year travel challenge to go solo at least once this year.
Challenge 6: Connect with Locals in Every Destination
It’s easy to go to a place and never truly engage with the locals. A powerful travel challenge is to commit to talking to at least one local in each place you visit.
This could be a restaurant owner, a shopkeeper, a tour guide, a bartender, a taxi driver, a farmer, a stranger on the street. The goal is to connect, to make that interaction meaningful, to go deeper than just smiling and speaking superficially.
Challenge 7: Travel more sustainably
The world of travel is becoming more and more aware of its impact on the places we visit. It’s easy to feel like the problem is too big for us to make a difference. But every small act counts.
Commit to a new year travel challenge of being more sustainable in your travels. Whether that’s reducing the number of flights you take, staying at green accommodations, supporting local business, or practicing leave no trace principles, sustainable travel is an excellent way to shift your travel experience.
Challenge 8: Limit social media while traveling
Social media is double-edged. We look at the accounts of the “best” travelers and get inspired, but we then compare and feel worse about our travel.
Challenge yourself to be more present and less focused on Instagram this year by not checking social media as much, posting only after a trip, or setting aside dedicated time to post while still in the moment.
Challenge 9: Document your travels for yourself, not for an audience
Travel documentation isn’t just photos for social media. Document your travels for yourself with a travel journal, voice memos, art, writing, or other recording method.
Challenge 10: Reflect after every trip
Travel ends too often abruptly with no time to integrate the experience into our lives and thinking.
Challenge yourself to after every trip, no matter how small, to process and reflect on it. How did it change you? What did you learn? What was unexpected? Reflection allows you to turn experiences into wisdom.
Travel Challenges for Real Life
Travel challenges are only worthwhile if they work for your life. Travel is meant to be liberating, not stressful. You do not need to travel often or extravagantly to travel with intention.
Choose travel challenges that excite you and leave you a little nervous. They should stretch you and push you outside of your comfort zone.
Adjust your challenges as the year goes on. A well-chosen travel challenge can transform a single trip. A single thoughtful trip can be more valuable than a hundred rushed vacations.
Travel challenges are not a test. They are experiments, a way to push you into courage, curiosity, and openness.
Travel in the Year Ahead
Travel has the power to shift how we experience the world and ourselves. Travel transforms when we are intentional about how we approach it.
Travel challenges for the new year are ways to use travel as a practice, not an escape. As you think about the year to come, how do you want to grow through travel? How can travel challenges help you live more fully, more deeply, more wisely?
Every trip we take, no matter how small, becomes more meaningful when we approach it with purpose.
And when we choose the right challenges, the year ahead can be not only a year of travel, but also a year of true transformation.
Save pin for later
