I Tried The Surprise Travel Trend For My Honeymoon

The latest travel trend—surprise travel—sends vacationers to a mystery destination after filling out a personal questionnaire and providing their trip’s budget. Travel writer and contributor to AFAR Magazine Serena Renner shares what happened when she and her husband tried their own mystery vacation for their honeymoon.

At first, we kind of went back and forth about whether we wanted to go on a honeymoon at all and where we would go. I don’t know if it was him or me, but somewhere in that brainstorm we said “how cool it would be to do a surprise travel-style honeymoon where someone else picks our destination and we just show up in a place and kinda figure it out as we go?” And that’s how it all began.

I worked with AFAR for two years before moving to Sydney, Australia, where I’m currently based, and now a freelance writer. I was really inspired by their “Spin the Globe” section which is when the editors spin a globe and draw the name of a random country—then they send a writer there with only 24 hours notice. I used to love that section and I think that stuck with me, that idea, and ended up being the inspiration for my honeymoon.

My husband I eloped in Sydney at the end of March. We planned a very small ceremony and party, and then would embark on our mystery honeymoon vacation afterwords. We didn’t have time to plan a trip with our wedding planning, so that was one of the reasons we decided on this type of vacation.

I have a friend named Trish who owns a travel business called White Star Travel in Sydney, so I thought, ‘let’s give her a budget and have her book the trip and surprise us.’ At the start we gave her our flight budget—$800 leaving from Sydney airport. We said the more random the location, the better, just not more than $800 or $900 dollars. We asked her to book the first night’s hotel accommodation and then we decided we would just wing it and plan the rest from there. We didn’t take a questionnaire, which is popular in most surprise travel vacations. The only thing we did do was write down everywhere we had already been in that part of the world. Our number one requirement was to go somewhere where neither one of us had ever visited before.

On the day before our flight, Trish just gave us an envelope with a Lonely Planet travel guide, a flight confirmation and an accommodation that we said we wouldn’t open until we got to the airport. The only clue she gave was that it would be warm, so we essentially packed one backpack each with clothes for warm weather and not much else. We showed up to the airport, sat down at a café and opened this white envelope. We see this Lonely Planet book that says Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, so we weren’t sure which of the three it was. We look at our itinerary and it was Scoot airlines, which we had never heard of, to Singapore. I think we were both initially a little bit disappointed because we both had high expectations and Singapore we knew was a modern city, very high tech and clean and maybe not that cultural. Then we started flipping through the Lonely Planet and we noticed that all these islands like Malaysia were right there, so the more we thought about it, the more excited we got.

Our first cultural surprise in Singapore occurred on the cab ride from the airport to our hotel. There was a Muslim call for prayer. We were like “Huh? We’re in Singapore” We thought of it more as a secular place. It turned out to be more of a Muslim/Middle Eastern part of town and there was a big, beautiful mosque on the road that we were staying on. We were very surprised, in a good way. We didn’t really realize that there were these older ethnic neighborhoods in Singapore.

The second surprise came in a not so good fashion. It turns out that our travel agent booked us a higher-end hostel, so night one of our honeymoon we walk into this room and it’s nice enough, a little bit designer-y in terms of light fixtures and the tiles on the floor, but it’s small, has no windows and we walk in to find a bunk bed—not very romantic for our honeymoon. At that point, we were a little bit tired and frustrated early on when we got there, but when we left the hostel to explore, that’s when the amazing part of the adventure began.

We started walking around these streets full of kabob shops and went to this amazing Singaporean street food stall and had some noodles. It just felt really adventurous. We had no idea where we were in this really random neighborhood that we had no idea existed. Then we went to Little India, where there are flower stalls that you see in India with the marigolds just hanging from the stalls—it was totally a multicultural place and not at all what we were expecting from Singapore.