I’m Off On Holiday - But Who Knows Where? Will My ‘mystery Travel’ Experiment End In Delight Or Disappointment?

In a world of endless choice, many holidaymakers are opting out altogether – booking a surprise trip and finding out the destination at the airport. But can it ever be as fun as something you’ve picked yourself?

I do not, if i can help it, fly before noon. I do not book airlines that charge a fee for a glass of water. And I do not have any particular interest in Romania, a country I mainly associate with cold-war gymnastics and Andrew Tate. And yet there I was at Luton at 7.30am on a Sunday morning, blearily scanning the departures board for Bucharest. I would not have chosen any of this – and that was precisely the point. In the name of letting go and embracing surprise, I had outsourced the planning of this entire holiday to a mystery travel agency. A few weeks before, I had filled out a brief survey on my preferences – ranking my relative interest in historic sites, nature, standup paddleboarding and scuba diving – and left the rest up to fate, AKA a company called Journee.

I was drawn to this concept for a few reasons. Mystery travel is increasingly popular with millennials like me, and I wanted to know if it lived up to the hype. My last couple of trips involved so many late-night sessions in front of Booking.com, so many hours browsing Instagram recommendations and Lonely Planet listicles, that by the time I was squirting shampoo and conditioner into 100ml containers, I was not so much eagerly anticipating a getaway as anxiously wondering whether I’d optimised the itinerary. Then, if I did have a disappointing experience abroad, I felt like it was my own fault: I must not have done enough research.