Travel can change how we experience romance, desire, and sexuality. Here’s why some travelers feel freer to explore their sexual side on vacation.
Back in May, pop star Kesha appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast, where she opened up about reclaiming her sexuality after long legal battles and years of public scrutiny. During the conversation, the “TiK ToK” singer revealed that she’s celibate.
“Except for when I’m in Italy,” she told host Alex Cooper.
That’s definitely amore, as Dean Martin might say.
Plenty of travelers recognize that feeling—when a destination seems to unlock entirely different versions of ourselves. Maybe it means saying yes to the sunrise hike, a local pub crawl, or the cooking class you’d quietly dismiss back home. Maybe it’s flirting with a stranger over aperitivos in Rome. Or maybe the dependable, buttoned-up version of you gives way to someone who’s suddenly curious about a threesome.
Or maybe you’ve witnessed vacation alter egos within your travel group. The shy friend who somehow collects phone numbers in Lisbon. The coworker who downloads Tinder the moment they land in Buenos Aires after swearing off dating apps for good. The happily partnered couple who become noticeably more adventurous the second they check into a boutique hotel.
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“I’m only poly in Brazil,” confessed one commenter beneath a clip of the Kesha interview.
It might sound like a joke, but there’s a broader pattern here—one that Samantha Allen, an editor at Them, dubbed “geosexuality.” The term describes the way some people’s romantic or sexual behavior changes depending on their location.
In scholarly circles, “geosexual” has been used to describe the relationship between sexuality and geography. But it’s also useful shorthand to capture a phenomenon many travelers already recognize—that sometimes a change of scenery comes with a change of self, at least for a little while.
Travel Gives Desire Room to Breathe
Geosexuality also raises an interesting question. Does travel actually change us, or does it simply give us permission to become people we’ve secretly been all along?
“There’s this identity-based piece to it,” says Dr. Anna Elton, a Florida-based sexologist whose new book, The Formula of Desire, came out earlier this month. “Whenever you’re home, you’re more likely creating this identity of a partner, an employee, a parent. There’s no place for desire. It could be the last thing on the list, if it even makes the list at all.”
Travel interrupts that. When you’re in a new environment, there’s no laundry, no group chat about pickup schedules. Nobody needs anything from you. You’re eating meals you didn’t cook. You’re sleeping in crisp hotel sheets instead of the bed you associate with folding laundry. Suddenly there’s room in your head (and your body) for something other than errands.
That’s where novelty comes in. Novelty matters because it increases dopamine—the neurotransmitter associated with curiosity, motivation, and reward—making people more willing to step outside their comfort zones.
“When people travel, they have new experiences,” Elton says. “That releases dopamine, which makes people more energized, optimistic, curious, and willing to step outside their comfort zone.”
In other words, the vacation version of you isn’t necessarily wilder. It’s just operating under a different set of conditions.
Your Brain on Vacation
There’s also a physiological component.
Being away from home often means less chronic stress, which lowers cortisol, the hormone associated with diminished sexual desire when it’s persistently elevated.
When you’re stuck in the churn of deadlines, childcare, errands, and the thousand tiny obligations of everyday life, your brain is focused on getting through the day, not necessarily getting in the mood.
But vacation strips away that mental clutter. Someone else is making the bed. You’re not worrying about what’s in the fridge or whether you remembered to pay the electric bill. Even a few days away can create enough breathing room for desire to move back up the priority list.
That’s one reason travel romance can feel surprisingly effortless. Sometimes the sexiest thing about being on vacation isn’t the candlelit restaurant or the ocean view. It’s that, for the first time in a while, your brain has stopped treating everything else as more urgent.
A Destination Can Become Part of the Fantasy
Some places do part of the work for us.
Paris is practically trademarked as the City of Love. Santorini is the backdrop for countless engagements, while Ibiza is for hedonism. Las Vegas has built an empire around the idea that what happens there stays there. Even destinations without overtly romantic reputations can feel charged simply because we’ve spent decades absorbing stories about what happens there.
“When we think of Paris, we think of love,” Elton says. “When we think of Italy, you have the environment and the cultural narrative that this is the place where you connect romantically.”
Those expectations, she says, act as a kind of psychological priming, nudging us toward behaviors that fit the story we’ve already been telling ourselves.
Travel writer and Toronto Sun sex columnist Simone Paget decided to put one of those narratives to the test. While traveling in Italy, she set her Tinder to Passport Mode, which allows you to match with anyone in the world, to see whether dating there really felt different than it did back home.
Paget found that the experience wasn’t just the Italian men, it was more about Italian time. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry. Dates unfolded over languid meals and leisurely glasses of wine, conversation took precedence over rushing to the next thing, and the evening felt less like a transaction.
“It quickly became clear what was missing back home: the slow burn of romance,” she wrote. “In Italy, the men didn’t want more than my time, attention, and the shared joy of the moment–something that was surprisingly easy to give.”
The Freedom of Being Somewhere Nobody Knows You
Few people have a better vantage point on vacation alter egos than Catherine DeNoire, who manages a legal brothel in Western Europe (she keeps the exact location confidential for safety reasons).
DeNoire has watched thousands of tourists arrive with versions of themselves they’d rarely, if ever, introduce back home.
Her clientele ranges from curious solo travelers to bachelor parties that arrive with elaborate itineraries. Solo travelers tend to be motivated by curiosity. Then there are what the industry calls “mongers”: dedicated sex tourists who compare destinations, plan entire vacations around brothels, and later publish detailed reviews online.
What’s striking, DeNoire says, isn’t simply that people seek out sexual experiences while traveling. It’s how many insist they’d never consider doing the same thing at home.
Sometimes it’s fear of being recognized. Sometimes they have concerns about what a partner or colleague might think. Sometimes it’s simply that brothels are illegal or uncommon where they live. Abroad, those constraints evaporate.
“The risk feels much smaller,” she says.
Americans stand out in particular. Outside a handful of counties in Nevada, legal brothels are essentially nonexistent in the United States, while in other countries they’re highly visible and tightly regulated. For some visitors, the legality itself lowers psychological barriers. When an establishment is openly operating on the busiest street in town, it feels less taboo than seeking out something hidden.
But DeNoire thinks the bigger shift is psychological.
“When we travel, we lose some of the mundane protective filter that surrounds us in everyday life,” she says.
She compared it to souvenir shopping. At home, she walks past souvenir shops without a second glance. But on vacation, suddenly the postcard, the ridiculous T-shirt, and the overpriced mug all seem irresistible. People treat experiences the same way, she said.
Travel Doesn’t Create a New You. It Reveals One
Travel doesn’t magically turn us into different people. But, as DeNoire puts it, it can temporarily remove the filters that shape our everyday lives.
At home, you’re the reliable friend, the responsible coworker, the person who always orders the same drink. People know your habits. They know your routines. But on vacation, nobody knows that script. For some people, that shift opens the door to exploring parts of their sexuality they rarely have time or space to consider while answering emails and paying bills.
As DeNoire puts it, some people treat themselves with cocktails. Others splurge on expensive hotels. Others become curious about experiences they would never seek out at home.
Elton sees a similar pattern in her practice. One couple noticed that the husband reliably became more playful, flirtatious, and sexually engaged whenever they stayed in a hotel, even if it was only a short drive away. Eventually his wife started planning overnight getaways on purpose.
There was nothing magical about the destination itself. However, changing the setting was enough to interrupt years of routine and help them reconnect.
“Desire doesn’t disappear,” Elton says. “It just redirects.”
Maybe that’s why geosexuality resonates with so many travelers. The appeal isn’t necessarily becoming someone else. It’s embracing a version of yourself that routine, responsibility, and familiarity can bury.
Which brings us back to Kesha.
While the singer didn’t go into detail about her Italian exception to celibacy, she did talk about Italy’s role in helping her reconnect with her body and sense of self.
“I don’t hate my body anymore. I actually love my body,” she said. “I went to Italy and I ate a lot of pasta, and I love it.”