Picture a wellness retreat and a glass of wine probably isn’t part of the image. Silence, maybe. Green juice, sunrise yoga, a phone confiscated at check-in. But the definition is loosening, and a growing number of trips are proving that slowing down and enjoying a drink aren’t in competition.
Flash Pack, the company known for small-group adventure trips built for solo travelers in their 30s and 40s, has launched The Pause, a new collection of slower, more mindful trips designed for people who are, as the company puts it, always on. And on its Spain Mountain Reset in the Sierra de Mariola, the itinerary includes yoga, breathwork, massages and mountain hikes alongside leisurely meals, wine tastings and a self-serve bar for an evening glass. That means rest and a good Rioja sit comfortably in the same week.
Lee Thompson, Flash Pack’s co-founder and CEO, says the shift comes down to language as much as itinerary. The company polled a group of travelers on which wellness words actually turned them off, and the results were telling. “The wellness industry has a vocabulary problem,” he says. “We polled 2,000 people on which wellness words actually put them off, and a quarter of them said the word ‘wellness’ itself. Silent retreats, spiritual rituals, mindfulness, meditation- they all scored worse than yoga. People aren’t rejecting rest. They’re rejecting the language it comes wrapped in.”
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That distinction matters. Plenty of people want to unplug, sleep more, eat well, and actually talk to the people around them. What they don’t necessarily want is to be told they’re doing self-care wrong if that process includes a glass of wine at dinner. Thompson has seen this play out firsthand. He recently returned from Flash Pack’s Amazon well-being trip, a place about as far from a spa robe and a green smoothie as you can get. “No roads in or out, no signal, no internet,” he says. “And every night, the whole group sat down together and drank plenty of wine. It was the most present I’ve felt in years. Nobody was ‘doing breathwork.’”
On the Spain trip, wine isn’t just an amenity tacked on to make the itinerary feel less austere. Thompson argues it’s doing real work in bringing a group of strangers together. “We don’t put wine on these trips as a concession,” he says. “It’s doing a job. Nobody gets vulnerable on a yoga mat at 7 am. They get vulnerable at a table, three hours in, when the second bottle has gone, and someone finally says the thing they’ve been carrying around. That’s where the friendships actually happen.”
So what actually gets cut from these trips, if not the wine? According to Thompson, just one thing. “The only thing we take away is the phone,” he says. “Not the wine, not the food, not the long dinner. Take someone’s phone for a few days, and most of the reset happens on its own.”
That approach tracks with what people say they actually want from a vacation. When Flash Pack asked Americans what genuinely restores them while traveling, friendship and social connection topped the list, while digital detox came in dead last, at just 8 percent. “People want the outcome,” Thompson says. “They just don’t want to be sold it in that vocabulary.”
The Spain Mountain Reset leans into that idea. Set in the Sierra de Mariola, a mountain range in the Valencia region, the trip mixes structured wellness activities like guided hikes, yoga and breathwork with unstructured time built for connection: long, relaxed meals, wine tastings and evenings where a self-serve bar means nobody has to choose between winding down and having a drink. It’s a small group trip, so the “always-on generation” framing isn’t abstract. These are people who work full-time, run families, and rarely get a stretch of days where checking email isn’t an option, matched with a handful of other solo travelers doing the same.
None of this means wellness travel is becoming an excuse for a boozy vacation with a yoga class bolted on. The structure, intention, and offline time are still there with Flash Pack. What’s changed is the assumption that rest has to look a certain way to count, and that anything enjoyable somehow works against the reset rather than being part of it.
Add a mountain setting, a small group of people who all showed up solo, and a dinner table where the second bottle has just been opened, and wellness starts to look a lot more like something people would actually choose to do, rather than something they feel they should.
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