The first 24 hours are the worst.
That's what the research says. When you take someone's phone away on holiday, they go stir crazy for a day. They reach for the device that isn't there. They feel phantom vibrations in their pockets. They experience what can only be described as withdrawal.
Then something happens. Around hour 48, the anxiety starts to fade. By hour 72, they're playing board games, reading actual books, having conversations that last longer than the time it takes to check a notification. At the end of a three-day stay, researchers from the University of Greenwich and University of East Anglia found something remarkable: some guests are happy to have their phones back. Others are "take it or leave it" about the whole thing.
This is the strange alchemy of digital detox tourism. And it's booming.
According to the 2025 Hilton Trends Report, 27% of adults planning to travel say they intend to reduce social media use during their holidays. Plum Guide, a global luxury home-rental platform, has seen a 17% rise in searches for unplugged, tech-lite properties. In Mexico, Grand Velas Resorts launched a Digital Detox Program complete with a "Detox Concierge" who whisks away all electronic devices on arrival.
Here's what fascinates me about this trend: it's about giving less, not more. It's about absence. About what you're not getting. No WiFi. No phone signal. No TV. No screens of any kind. And people are paying extra for it.
We're so desperate to escape our digital lives that we'll pay a premium to be somewhere that makes escape mandatory.
Martin Dunford has been curating hotels and accommodations across the UK since 2012 through his website Cool Places. He noticed the shift happening in real time. "We used to have a tag to show which properties had wi-fi," he told the BBC. "Now we're adding a 'no wi-fi' tag."
His site now lists 34 places to enjoy a digital detox stay, from a Cornish eco-yurt to a boathouse on Ullswater in the Lake District. The list keeps growing.
Dunford partnered with the University of Greenwich and University of East Anglia to study what actually happens to people when they go offline on holiday. The pattern they found is consistent:
"Guests go stir crazy in the first 24 hours. But after 48 hours they are well adjusted and start getting into other activities. At the end of a three-day stay—or longer—we find guests may be happy to have their phones back or can be a bit take it or leave it about it."
The 48-hour mark seems to be the tipping point. Before that, it's withdrawal. After that, it's liberation.
Rosanna Irwin knows this pattern intimately. She spent years working at Facebook—"all hours with global teams, replying to all messages, in systems where we had 'unlimited holidays'—which really meant it was harder to justify taking a day off."
"Ultimately being online all the time like this really broke me," she said.
Her breaking point led to an epiphany on the Danish island of Samsø, where she spent three days with no internet. "I came home feeling cured," she told the BBC. "I quit my job, moved back to Ireland and spent the next eight months working on this idea. I felt this strong gut instinct to do it—and I hadn't listened to my gut for a long time."
That idea became Samsú—a series of off-grid cabins in rural Ireland, each within a 90-minute drive of a major city. The cabins have no WiFi, no technology, just board games, books, a radio, and simple cooking facilities. The only tweets guests hear are from actual birds.
Irwin opened two cabins in 2024. Three more are coming this summer.
Hector Hughes runs Unplugged, a group of 40 tech-detox cabins in the UK and Spain. He expects to have 60 cabins by the end of 2025. His origin story mirrors Irwin's: burnout at a startup, followed by a 10-day retreat at a Buddhist temple in the Himalayas without his phone.
"I was at breaking point in 2019," he said. "I had never had a break like it before."
He returned home, quit his job, and decided to create what he calls "a tech-free option like a retreat, but decoupled from religion and philosophy."
"So much of it is really about getting offline and getting into nature," Hughes told the BBC. "Just being offline for three days can have a profound effect on you. You feel a deep sense of calm at the end—it's quite surreal."
I keep thinking about the economics of this. Digital detox is essentially a negative feature. It's the absence of something that costs nothing to provide—internet connectivity—and yet properties can charge more for not having it. It's like paying extra for a hotel room without a television. The business model shouldn't work, but it does.
Why?
Because willpower isn't enough. You can't just decide to put your phone down. The research is clear on this: when university researchers investigated digital-free tourism in 2019, they discovered that many travelers experienced anxiety and frustration initially. But—and this is crucial—these negative emotions led to acceptance, enjoyment, and liberation over time.
Without having a boundary put in place by an external force—without having the option to use screens actually removed—those positive feelings might never have been reached at all.
It's the difference between trying to diet with cookies in the cupboard and trying to diet on a desert island. One requires constant willpower. The other requires none.
Ophelia Wu experienced this firsthand at Eremito, a former monastery in Umbria, Italy. The hotel has no WiFi, no phone signal, no tech, no TVs. Just brick walls, basic bedrooms, and candlelight.
"I was living a hectic life in London, and I found it overwhelming," she said. "I needed a break. I heard about this place and I was curious about it."
The buzz of bumblebees replaced the buzz of her notifications.
"When I left, I was reluctant to turn my phone back on," Wu said. "I got used to the peace of being unbothered and the lack of urgency."
That's the paradox at the heart of digital detox tourism. We're paying for the removal of something we could theoretically remove ourselves. We're outsourcing our self-control to hotels and retreat centers. And it's working.
The statistics about our digital lives are staggering. According to It's Time To Log Off, the average person spends a day each week online. Thirty-four percent of people have checked Facebook in the last 10 minutes. Sixty-two percent of polled adults "hate" how much time they spend on their phones.
We know this is bad for us. We know we should disconnect. And yet we can't.
Enter the digital detox retreat. The Detox Concierge. The no-WiFi tag. The cabin with only bird tweets.
I find something both hopeful and sad about this trend. Hopeful because it suggests people are recognizing the problem and taking action—even if that action requires paying someone else to solve it for them. Sad because it confirms how trapped we are. We've built a world where the default is constant connectivity, and opting out requires effort, planning, and money.
But maybe that's always been true of vacations. We pay to be somewhere else. We pay to have someone else cook our meals. We pay to have our beds made. Paying to have our digital lives managed is just the next logical step.
What's clear is that this isn't a fringe trend. When Hilton—one of the largest hotel chains in the world—includes digital detox in their annual trends report, when 27% of travelers say they plan to reduce social media use on holiday, when property platforms are adding "no WiFi" as a search filter, we're looking at a genuine shift in how people want to travel.
The question is whether this shift will last. Will we return from our unplugged cabins and off-grid retreats with new habits, or will we immediately fall back into old patterns? Will the calm we paid for persist, or will it evaporate the moment we reconnect?
I don't know the answer. But I know this: the fact that we're paying for disconnection suggests we value it more than we admit. The fact that we need external boundaries suggests our internal ones have failed. And the fact that this industry is growing suggests we're only beginning to grapple with what it means to truly be offline.
Maybe the real luxury isn't the cabin in the woods. Maybe it's the permission to be unreachable.
We're buying that permission now. One no-WiFi booking at a time.
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Tomás Rivera