Will Travel Make You More Creative? Researchers Say the Answer Depends on the Traveler

We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you ... you're just helping re-supply our family's travel fund.

The idea that travel boosts creativity has become such a standard part of how people justify taking trips that it’s rarely questioned anymore, but the research behind it is more specific and more conditional than the popular version of the claim suggests. A frequently cited body of work, including studies from psychologist Adam Galinsky and his collaborators, found that foreign experience is associated with increased creativity, but critically, not just any foreign experience whatsoever, and not for every traveler equally.

The key variable researchers kept finding wasn’t how far someone traveled or even how long they stayed abroad. It was whether they actually engaged with the foreign culture, adapting to local customs, interacting with local people, adjusting their own behavior to fit an unfamiliar context, versus experiencing a foreign location while remaining functionally isolated from it, as often happens on all-inclusive resort trips or heavily guided tours that minimize direct contact with local systems and people.

The Mechanism Researchers Point To

The theoretical explanation researchers favor is that creativity, at a cognitive level, often depends on the ability to draw connections between distant or seemingly unrelated concepts, a skill sometimes called cognitive flexibility in the academic literature. Adapting to an unfamiliar cultural context repeatedly exercises exactly this skill: figuring out how to solve a practical problem, ordering food, navigating transit, resolving a miscommunication, using a different set of cultural assumptions than the ones a person grew up with at home. That repeated practice, the theory holds, transfers to creative problem-solving in unrelated domains once someone eventually returns home.

This lines up with why researchers found multicultural experience mattered more than simple travel volume in their data. People who had lived abroad for extended periods, or who had deep engagement with multiple cultures over the course of their lives, showed stronger creativity gains on standard cognitive tests than people who had simply taken many short trips without ever developing deep engagement with the places they visited.

Why It Fails for Some Travelers Entirely

The flip side of the research is less discussed but equally important to the full picture: travelers who experience a foreign country with high anxiety, minimal local interaction, or a strong reliance on enclosed, familiar-feeling environments, resort compounds, English-speaking tour bubbles, itineraries designed specifically to minimize friction, don’t show the same creativity gains at all, and some research suggests high-stress travel without a sense of control can actually impair cognitive flexibility rather than enhancing it in any measurable way.

This creates a genuinely counterintuitive conclusion for anyone planning a trip specifically hoping for a creativity boost: the harder and more disorienting a trip feels in the moment, provided it doesn’t tip into genuinely unsafe territory, the more likely it is to produce the creativity benefits people generally associate with travel. A trip that feels effortless and frictionless throughout, however pleasant it is to experience, appears to be doing considerably less for cognitive flexibility than a trip that requires real daily problem-solving inside an unfamiliar system.

What This Means for How to Plan a Trip If Creativity Is the Goal

Choosing destinations where genuine navigation is required, different languages, different currencies, different transit systems, different food customs, appears to matter more than the specific distance traveled or the exotic reputation of the destination itself. Minimizing reliance on all-inclusive or fully guided formats that remove daily problem-solving from the traveler’s hands seems to be the single most important lever available to anyone trying to maximize this particular benefit of a trip.

Longer, deeper stays in fewer places consistently show stronger effects in the research than many short, surface-level stops crammed into the same overall trip length, suggesting that the old advice to slow down and stay longer in fewer destinations has a real cognitive science basis behind it, not just an aesthetic or budgetary one.

• Choose destinations where you’ll need to navigate systems different from home, language, currency, transit, food customs
• Minimize reliance on all-inclusive or fully guided formats that remove daily problem-solving
• Longer, deeper stays in fewer places show stronger effects than many short, surface-level stops
• Direct interaction with local people, not just local scenery, appears to be the strongest single factor

Why Business Travel Rarely Produces the Same Effect

Frequent business travelers, despite racking up far more total trips and countries visited than most leisure travelers ever will, often report surprisingly little of the creativity benefit the research describes, and researchers point to the highly structured, low-friction nature of most business travel as the likely explanation. Airport to hotel to conference room to airport again leaves little room for the kind of genuine cultural problem-solving that appears to drive the underlying cognitive effect in the first place.

Some companies have started experimenting with building unstructured local time into business trip itineraries specifically in response to this research, treating a few hours of genuine, unscripted local exploration as a legitimate professional development activity rather than simply a nice-to-have perk tacked onto a work trip.

Digital nomads and long-term remote workers present an interesting middle case researchers are still working through: they travel extensively like leisure travelers but often maintain work routines and social circles that mirror the low-friction structure of business travel, and early research on this population suggests the creativity benefits depend heavily on whether individual nomads actively seek out local integration or simply relocate their existing routines to a series of scenic backdrops.

How Companies Have Started Applying the Research

A handful of large employers have begun offering structured sabbatical or extended-travel benefits explicitly citing creativity and innovation research as part of the justification, treating deep cultural immersion as a genuine talent-development tool rather than simply a retention perk offered to keep valued employees happy.

Design and innovation consultancies have been especially quick to adopt this thinking, sending teams on immersive research trips to unfamiliar markets specifically to prime creative thinking before a major project kickoff, a practice that draws directly on the same cognitive flexibility research originally conducted using ordinary leisure travelers rather than corporate teams.