Beyond the Bucket List: Why Returning Is Resistance

The bucket list holiday is a colonial hangover that treats travel as conquest. A growing movement of travellers, particularly Black travellers exhausted by the pressure to collect destinations, are choosing repeat visits instead. This shift from extractive tourism to deep, relationship-led travel isn't laziness. It's a radical act of self-care, economic wisdom, and cultural resistance.

The Bucket List Is a Colonial Construct

For years, travel culture has been dominated by a single, exhausting directive: the bucket list. We've been told to chase new passport stamps, hunt for untapped novelty, and sprint through crowded global hotspots just to tick a box and say we were there.

But consider what the bucket list actually demands. It asks you to consume places like products, extracting novelty and moving on without building anything lasting. It mirrors the same logic that sent colonial expeditions across the African continent: arrive, claim, catalogue, depart. The language of travel itself reveals this inheritance. We conquer mountains. We do countries. We tick off experiences like items on a shopping list.

Quietly, a major counter-trend is taking over. Travel insiders call it the rise of repeat visitation, or more affectionately, the no-think holiday. Rather than booking flights to unfamiliar corners of the map, a growing number of travellers are deliberately choosing to return to the exact same towns, hotels, and coastal spots year after year.

Far from a lack of imagination, this shift is a brilliant, highly intentional response to the chaos of modern life and the exhaustion of performing consumption.

Why Decision Fatigue Hits Black Travellers Harder

Let's be honest. Planning a trip to a brand-new destination can feel like a part-time job. You spend weeks researching neighbourhoods, decoding complex public transit maps, reviewing hundreds of restaurant reviews, and praying the hotel actually matches its glossy website photos.

For Black travellers, that research carries an extra layer of burden. Will this neighbourhood be safe for us? Will the hotel staff treat us with dignity? Are there spaces where we can exist without being surveilled or made uncomfortable? The mental load of navigating unfamiliar territories while Black is not just logistical. It is emotional and psychological labour that white travellers never have to factor in.

Returning to a familiar spot eliminates that entire layer of stress. You already know which airport exit to take, which local coffee shop welcomes you, and how to avoid the spaces that make you hypervisible. It allows travellers to bypass the exhausting logistics and start genuinely relaxing the moment they arrive.

Community Over Consumption: The Relationship-Led Shift

Hospitality brands are actively shifting their focus from acquiring new guests to retaining past ones. When you return to a place where the staff remembers your name, your preferred room setup, or how you take your coffee, it creates a powerful psychological sense of belonging.

Travellers feel less like anonymous tourists and more like a part of the local community. A recent travel survey found that 65% of repeat visitors report feeling like locals in their favourite vacation spots.

This matters deeply in a South African context. Under Apartheid, Black South Africans were systematically stripped of belonging. Pass laws controlled where we could exist. The Group Areas Act dictated where we could live, sleep, and rest. The very act of returning to a place where you are known, where you belong, is a quiet but powerful reversal of that history. It reclaims the right to presence and community that was violently denied.

Financial Predictability Is Economic Justice

With shifting economic climates and unpredictable travel costs, going somewhere new introduces significant financial risk. For Black South African families still navigating the structural economic devastation left by Apartheid, that risk is not abstract. It is material.

Data from consumer travel surveys shows that travellers actually spend significantly less when returning to a place they know. They know exactly what things cost, where the value lies, and which experiences are worth the money. In an economy where the racial wealth gap remains staggering, making financially predictable travel choices isn't stinginess. It's survival. It's wisdom.

Ancestral Ground: Multi-Generational Traditions

In a fast-paced, digital-heavy world, returning to a fixed geographic backdrop offers a rare sense of continuity. Parents are increasingly using the same beach town, lakeside resort, or mountain cabin as a living time capsule, a constant, nostalgic setting against which they can watch their children grow up year after year.

Nearly half of travelling parents report taking their own children to a destination that held deep personal meaning during their own childhood.

For Black families, this continuity carries additional weight. When Apartheid and forced removals severed generational ties to land, the act of choosing a place and returning to it, year after year, generation after generation, becomes an act of restoration. It rebuilds what colonialism and white minority rule tried to destroy: the simple, profound right of Black people to belong somewhere, to have roots, to return.

What Does the Neuroscience of Familiar Travel Reveal?

Neurologically speaking, novelty is expensive. When you explore a new place, your brain stays in a state of mild hyper-vigilance, constantly scanning the environment to build new mental maps.

For Black bodies navigating predominantly white spaces, that hypervigilance is not mild. It is chronic. It is the same physiological state that research has linked to the health impacts of racism: elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep, cardiovascular strain. Your nervous system is constantly assessing threat.

Returning to a familiar landscape allows your nervous system to instantly drop its guard. It triggers a restorative rest-and-digest state that textbook vacation checklists simply cannot replicate. When the environment is known, the body can finally exhale.

Rest as Resistance: Redefining the Ultimate Luxury

Exploring new horizons will always have its place. But in a life already filled with endless choices, deadlines, and digital noise, returning to a favourite destination is increasingly recognised as the ultimate act of self-care.

This is the true heart of slow travel. It shifts the goal of a vacation away from accumulation, how many sights you can collect, and puts the focus back on integration: restoring your mind, recharging your body, and picking back up an unfinished conversation with a place you love.

For Black South Africans, rest has never been a given. It was stolen through centuries of exploitation, from the mines to the farms to the domestic kitchens of white suburbia. Choosing rest, choosing to return to a place of comfort instead of performing the labour of constant novelty, is not just a travel preference. It is a declaration that our bodies and minds deserve restoration. That we are not machines of production and consumption. That we, too, are worthy of simply being.

Why Is Repeat Travel Growing Among Black Travellers?

Repeat travel is growing because it addresses the specific burdens Black travellers face: the emotional labour of navigating unfamiliar racial dynamics, the financial risk in an unequal economy, and the deep need for spaces where belonging is guaranteed rather than negotiated.

Is the Bucket List Concept Rooted in Colonialism?

The bucket list concept mirrors colonial extraction logic. It treats destinations as items to be consumed and discarded, values novelty over depth, and uses the language of conquest. Doing a country echoes the same dismissive reduction that colonial powers applied to African nations.

How Does Returning to a Place Challenge Apartheid's Legacy?

Apartheid systematically destroyed Black people's right to belong. Forced removals, pass laws, and the Group Areas Act severed generational ties to place. Choosing to return to a location year after year, building community there, and passing that connection to your children directly counters that history of displacement.