”Bästa jag sovit i mitt liv” – trenden som delar resenärer

Tired of being tired, travelers are booking REM-fueled trips; ‘The best sleep of my life!’

Kaitlyn Rosati’s latest getaway featured none of her usual hallmarks of adventure. There were no predawn hikes or multicity tours. Her itinerary involved one activity only: sleep.

Rosati slept for 16 hours on the first night of her stay at a hotel in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., last year. When she woke up in the early hours of the afternoon, she had breakfast, took a bath, then headed straight back to bed for a four-hour nap.

“I’m hooked, this is awesome,” she said after the first night of her stay. By the second day, Rosati didn’t bother leaving her bed at all.

A growing cohort of Gen Z and millennial travelers are choosing REM-fueled trips they’ve dubbed the “sleepcation.” For them, the ultimate vacation luxury isn’t a nice view—it’s a mattress.

Hotels are leaning in. Rosati, 35, signed up for a special sleep package that, for an extra $99, kitted her room out with CBD gummies, skin-care products, bath bombs, weighted blankets and satin lavender eye masks.

She got to choose her pillow from an extensive menu. Would it be bamboo charcoal memory foam, a C-shaped full body or a honeycomb hole? Maybe one with an adjustable height for neck support? In the end, Rosati opted for a medium-support pillow with “a touch of down.”

Even with all the accoutrements, doing nothing took some getting used to for the travel blogger, who has climbed Kilimanjaro and recently explored Antarctica. In fact, it was friends asking her if she is even capable of relaxing that sparked the idea of a sleepcation.

“It was the total opposite style of how I usually travel,” Rosati said. “But once you accept you’re there just to sleep and do nothing else, it’s incredible.”

She is already planning another.

New York and London are out (too busy). So is anywhere too warm. The optimal location for a sleepcation, Rosati said, is a sleepy town in a colder season. Because it’s not about how much of the world you see, but how much of it you can shut out.

For the hospitality industry, the sleepcationer is a dream demographic. A guest in bed isn’t wearing down the lobby or requiring a concierge. Instead, they’re bringing in extra money with the charcoal bedtime lattes they’re ordering from room service and the upgrades for AI-powered beds that analyze sleep quality and hotel-offered sleep doctors.

Many sleep experts worry a sleepcation is just a temporary Band-Aid for a broken work-life balance. Studies suggest that catching up on rest at the weekend doesn’t actually undo the impact of sleep deprivation.

“Sleep tourism is not a meaningful fix for insufficient sleep,” said Joyce Adesina, sleep medicine specialist at Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California. “Consistent sufficient sleep is more beneficial for one’s long-term health than having occasional long episodes.”

But for many people, traveling provides a rare opportunity to leave behind the daily pressures and chores that can keep them from getting a good night’s sleep at home.

LaSharria Taylor, a family nurse practitioner, usually only gets three to four hours of sleep a night because of her work shifts. For her 33rd birthday, all she wanted was some shut-eye.

Instead of spending time with her family or going out with friends, Taylor celebrated alone at a luxury hotel near her home in Atlanta.

From the time she checked in to the time she checked out, she was either sleeping or lounging. “It’s unheard of for me to get so much rest as a nurse,” she said. “It was the best sleep of my life!”

Not only is the sleepcation now part of her vacation rotation, but Taylor plans to find ways to incorporate naps into other trips, too.

Tired of being tired, Shaunique Hill is already a sleepcation pro. She books one at least once a quarter, either alone or with her boyfriend.

The 36-year-old software developer, who lives in Dallas, takes an Uber 20 minutes up the road to a hotel for the weekend. For two days, she sleeps until 1 p.m. or 2 p.m., orders room service, takes a nap before dinner and then sleeps through the night.

“I think I’m a professional sleeper,” she said.

Hill returns home Sunday night rejuvenated. “I feel like I’ve come back from a vacation out of the state,” she said.

Having loved the local sleepcations so much, she’s now planning to actually venture out of state to spend weekends sleeping in New York, Miami and Los Angeles.

For other kinds of travelers, that sounds like torture. “If I’m paying a lot of money to go somewhere, and fly across the world, why would I want to waste the time sleeping?” said Christen Wall, a business owner from Oregon.

Wall, 28, wastes no time at all on vacation. She plans out every part of the trip to avoid even one misspent moment. “I’m not leaving without an itinerary,” she said.

Natalie Spack feels for anyone taking a sleepcation. “Those people must really need sleep.”

The 33-year-old writer in Los Angeles prefers hiking, kayaking and climbing mountains when she travels. “The best rest for me is adventure,” she said. “It fuels me better than sleeping all day.”

Rosati has heard it all before. When the travel blogger told people about her sleepcation, she mostly heard the same retort: “It’s a sad world we live in where people travel just to sleep,” she recalled.

She begs to differ. “It’s a genius idea.” She doesn’t mind the haters. She simply drowns them out with the sound machine as she drifts into a deep sleep.