Discover how reading retreats became the ultimate escape for book lovers, and explore the best readaways around the world.
Everyone hits the wall eventually. The calendar fills, the inbox wins, and one evening you catch yourself fantasizing about being anywhere else. So you do what people have always done: you book the escape. However, while other travellers build itineraries, readers build a stack. You don’t worry about packing light; paper is heavy, after all. The rental gets chosen for its armchair and the quality of its lamplight. And the first question isn’t, “where do I want to go?” It’s, “What do I want to read when I get there?”
Consider the reader who checked into an apartment above a bookstore on Nantucket’s cobblestoned Broad Street one November: shelves everywhere, a leather couch where the light fell just right, coffee mugs bearing the likeness of Moby Dick. She spent the night with Daniel Mason’s North Woods while the ocean air pressed against the windows, and described the whole arrangement, in Travel + Leisure, as her “ideal situation.” Millions of us, it turns out, agree with her.
The travel industry now has a name for this: the readaway. And for once, the industry is following the readers rather than the other way around.
A Trend Written in the Numbers
The term “readaway” comes from Vrbo, coined in Expedia Group’s Unpack ’26 trend report, which found that 91% of travellers are interested in a getaway centred on reading, relaxation and quality time with loved ones. The supporting data reads like a plot twist. Mentions of reading-related terms in Vrbo guest reviews nearly tripled in 2026. Pinterest searches for “book club retreat ideas” jumped 265%. Skyscanner reports that 43% of travellers have booked, or would consider, a trip inspired by a book, and hotel bookings using its “library” filter climbed 70% globally.
Call it a readaway, a book-cation, or literary travel. Hot on the heels of “set-jetting” (i.e., travel inspired by film and television), readers are reclaiming the itinerary. With 2026 designated the National Year of Reading in the UK and the #BookTok community turning novels into viral phenomena, the timing feels less like coincidence and more like a homecoming.
Here is the strange, telling paradox underneath it all. This bookish wanderlust is blooming even as the share of people who read for pleasure has fallen 40% since 2003, and visits to American public libraries dropped by more than half between 2012 and 2022.
We are not reading less because we love books less. We are reading less because modern life rarely grants us a moment of unhurried quiet, so now we are travelling to find it. Jane Ubell-Meyer, founder of Bedside Reading, put it plainly to The New York Times: “It’s about shutting off the computer and the phone and calming yourself down.” A book, she added, helps you do exactly that.
Following the Story to Its Source
Literary pilgrimages are as old as literature itself. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises has been sending travelers to Pamplona for a century. Devoted Janeites flocked to England in 2025 for Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, and this year pilgrims are trekking to the English countryside for the centenary of Winnie-the-Pooh.
What’s new is the infrastructure rising to meet them. This summer, EF Ultimate Break launched a 12-day journey through Croatia inspired by Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation, tracing the novel’s path from Dubrovnik to Split. Novel Travels runs a variety of tours built around books, including New York tours built around Fiona Davis’s historical fiction, and a 2027 Egypt tour is based off of four different titles, among them Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile.
“Travel becomes more meaningful when you already feel something for that destination,” founder Corinne Levine told the Times, and books are how the feeling gets there first. One traveller, Renee Haight, 84, compressed the whole philosophy into ten words: “Literature gives us a purpose… I’ve seen enough old buildings.”
Timbuktu Travel crafts South African itineraries shaped by Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, and co-founder Johnny Prince speaks on this. An author, he says, asks you to “sit with a place rather than rush past it,” and the readers booking these trips are opting out of the highlights reel accordingly. That, in a sentence, is the soul of slow travel.
Hotels That Read You Like a Book
Hoteliers, meanwhile, are becoming librarians of place. In London, The Academy sits among streets once walked by Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. Just this past Valentine’s Day, it offered guests a “Blind Date with a Book“: a wrapped mystery title, chosen from a few clue words. At The Gainsborough Bath Spa, Austen lovers can soak in the Regency world that shaped her novels.
Edinburgh’s Glasshouse Hotel trades on the legacy of Scott, Stevenson, and Rowling in the world’s first UNESCO City of Literature, and Monkey Island Estate in Bray, once visited by Rebecca West, author of The Return of the Soldier, offers a wealth of uninterrupted reading time.
Across the Atlantic, Scribner’s Catskill Lodge hosts a quarterly book club where readers stay overnight to meet the author. Lake Austin Spa Resort weaves reading hours between yoga and mindfulness sessions. The Williams Inn in the Berkshires leaves books in your room, personally selected by a local bookstore. Avani Hotels & Resorts recently launched a book club across 15 properties worldwide, stocking corners with titles that reflect each destination. Even a heritage railway in Indiana, the Nickel Plate Express, now runs “Read and Rides”: two library-quiet hours of turning pages while the countryside rolls by.
A Global Chapter
None of this belongs to one country. In New Zealand, the Busy With Books retreats in Martinborough have drawn waiting lists of readers hungry for communal quiet. England’s Ladies Who Lit gathers a dozen or so readers for four days in locales around the world, the trip kicking off with a book swap.
Meanwhile, literary festivals from Aspen to Santa Fe to Charleston, the latter marking its tenth year this November, draw thousands. “Books open doors to other worlds,” says Charleston Literary Festival director Sarah Moriarty, and she finds it no surprise that readers eventually follow with their feet.
Which may be the readaway’s secret. In a world that scrolls, readers linger. A novel read in the place that inspired it is a way of honouring another culture’s stories, streets, and silences. It turns tourists into guests, and guests into citizens of a wider world. As Amy Alipio of the Travel Book Club observes, a book can give you “the significance of a place that a guidebook or travel article won’t.”
So yes, take the getaway. Everyone needs one. Just take it the way readers always have: pack lightly, but bring the heavy book. Choose the slower train, the smaller town, the off-season shore. Being an old soul, a lover of paper and ink and long afternoons, has never been more gloriously in style. The world, after all, is a library of experiences. The readaway is simply your library card.
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K Lou
K. Lou is a writer born in the U.S. who found her way to Japan through a spiritual calling—or, more precisely, better access to tea. She writes about travel, culture, and the occasional creative piece, inspired by her enduring love of books. This love began in high school when K. Lou carried books around to avoid seeming odd while lost in thought. Once she started reading, she never stopped. With zero regrets, she continues to explore the written word and invites others to join her in celebrating its varied forms.
