![]() “Many guests have shared that through the challenging year, mostly at home, they found themselves drinking more than they ever had before,” said the director of guest relations, Barry Shingle, in an email. Their ranks have also grown at Rancho La Puerta, a fitness and spa resort in Tecate, Mexico, where no alcohol is served in the dining room. The Art of Living Retreat Center, a vegan wellness retreat in North Carolina that doesn’t serve alcohol, reports a 50 percent increase in visitors specifically seeking out a sober vacation. “I think we’re going to bust loose,” he said. ![]() Now they’re seeing spikes in popularity: Steve Abrams, who founded Sober Vacations International in 1987, said trips for next year are nearly sold out. She herself quit drinking in 2016, and found travel to be the last and most daunting hurdle.Īlcohol-free travel companies, like Travel Sober, We Love Lucid and Sober Outside, were organizing completely dry trips long before the pandemic. ![]() “The pandemic really shone a light on our drinking habits,” Ms. Warrington’s books have tapped into the global movement of “ sometimes sobriety” that has been marked by trends like Dry January and #mindfuldrinking. She followed that book up in December 2020 with “The Sober Curious Reset,” a 100-day guide to rethinking your relationship with alcohol. Ruby Warrington, who published the book “Sober Curious” in 2018, has been fielding regular questions about sober travel in her eponymous Facebook group, where membership has swelled in the last year. “But my friends have been so supportive.” “I had anxiety about planning the trip, because I’m newly sober and I knew it was going to be an obstacle to travel sober with other people who are not sober,” she said. To complement a new meditation practice that has helped with her sobriety, she has planned visits to Sedona’s supposed energy vortexes, which are said to help with meditation and healing. Ramirez will stock the Airbnb fridge with nonalcoholic beer and act as designated driver of the rental car. “But the pandemic, being at home and just sitting with my thoughts made me flip a switch and say, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”įor the September trip with her girlfriends, Ms. “If you had asked me a year ago, it would have been impossible for me to think that I was going to stop drinking for good,” Ms. Even airlines are going dry: After banning booze in the cabin in 2020, several airlines are postponing a return to serving alcohol thanks to unruly passengers. Forty-seven percent of the respondents to American Express’s Global Travel Trends Report in March said that wellness and mental health were among their top motivators for travel in 2021, and an analysis of social media chatter from Hootsuite, a social-media management platform, showed mentions of the term “sober vacation” jumping more than 100 percent over Memorial Day weekend. In a June poll of more than 23,000 people by Branded Research, 29 percent of respondents said they planned to take an alcohol-free trip after the pandemic. Now, as vaccination levels rise and Americans head back to the roads and skies, sober travel, a subset of vacations once relegated only to 12-steppers and recovering addicts, is going mainstream. Many Americans turned to alcohol to blunt the stress, isolation and fear of the past 15 months: An October study in JAMA Network Open, the journal of the American Medical Association, found that Americans were drinking 14 percent more than in the previous year. So when she began scouting locations for a break with a few non-sober friends, she suggested Sedona, Ariz., where they all will hike and wake up early, and she will avoid potential pitfalls like nightclubs and beachfront bars. In March, like many others during this hard year, she realized her drinking was spiraling beyond the merely social kind. Ramirez, 32, spent the first 12 months of the pandemic working remotely from a tiny Brooklyn apartment, drinking every weekend and many weekday evenings as well. And this summer, she’ll mark a new milestone for her sobriety: a completely alcohol-free vacation. One year into the coronavirus pandemic, after months of gaining weight and feeling groggy, Mayra Ramirez stopped drinking.
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