Amenities offered at one of the world’s most remote Airbnbs include two wooden beds, sleeping bags, and an open-fire stove for cooking. A complimentary mug of reindeer milk tea greets you on arrival.

The Dukha Reindeer Herders’ Traveling Teepee is located at varying places in the taiga, or snow forest, in northern Mongolia. Otgonbayar and Zorigt, members of a nomadic family who could be your hosts there, are tapping into the modern traveler’s desire to do more than simply go on vacation. “In 2019, there’s an increased preference among U.S. travelers for...unique and transformative experiences,” travel industry analysis group Skift found in a recent survey.

Inspired by our feeds, friends, and followers, we’re hungry for authentic—and highly Instagrammable—journeys. At the same time, technology has made it possible for us to access the whole world from our smartphones, transforming travel from being either a limited, predictable trip or a total shot in the dark into an opportunity for a well-researched adventure.

“A trick we use to seek out amazing places is to think of a category of housing—say a tree house with an ocean view,” says Mike Elgan, a technology and culture journalist and author of Gastronomad: The Art of Living Everywhere and Eating Everything. “Type ‘tree house, ocean view, site:airbnb.com’ in Google. Then switch the category to Google Images and up come photos of every tree house with an ocean view [on the platform].” The benefit of this type of query versus Airbnb’s own search box is that it opens up destinations you’ve never heard of. “Airbnb’s algorithms aren’t designed to let you find the best destination,” says Elgan. “They’re designed to make sure every place is rented.”

“With the internet, people have more information and feel more comfortable traveling to places they may never have considered before.”
—Dylan Thuras, Atlas Obscura cofounder

It’s risky, though, to gamble your precious two weeks’ vacation on a great photo. Instead, you can ease into nontraditional global exploration with the help of experiential travel services, such as Atlas Obscura. What began as a crowd-sourced, online catalog of unlikely travel destinations, Atlas Obscura is redefining adventure travel with small, tailor-made guided trips to increasingly unusual, even bizarre destinations. Tour the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and ghost town of Pripyat, Ukraine, or have dinner on the edge of The Gates of Hell, a natural gas field collapsed into an underground cavern near Darwaza, Turkmenistan.

“Internet tourism economically is a gigantic force,” says Atlas Obscura cofounder Dylan Thuras. “While it has the ability to destroy places, such as Barcelona and Venice, which struggle with tourism done irresponsibly, on the flip side we see areas where people really need the support, where tourism money is going to help with their survival.”

Not everyone wants to ditch everyday Western civilization for a sojourn in a Berber tent in the Sahara. The Skift survey also found an increasing preference among U.S. travelers for adventures close to home, and technology can help here, too. Spend the weekend on a working shiitake mushroom farm in upstate New York, sleep in an old chicken coop in a native seed bank off the coast of Seattle, do yoga with gibbons in a conservation center near Los Angeles, or stay in a hogan hosted by a member of the tribe on Navajo land in Arizona.

“The internet is doing to travel what it’s done to every other space—democratizing access to information, places, and people,” says Alyssa Ravasio, founder of Hipcamp, a website and app that lets you find places to stay (including those listed above) on land ranging from private ranches and farms to vineyards and nature preserves.

Once you’ve discovered the perfect destination, how do you get there? To find Otgonbayar and Zorigt last summer, you could have said “settings.holly.stereo” into your phone. That combination, which pulled up the family’s then current location, was created by a UK startup called what3words. The company has divided the world into 57 trillion 10-by-10-foot squares and given each one a unique three-word address. It has made finding remote places—or just your friend’s favorite spot on the beach—far easier than typing in a string of GPS coordinates.

According to a survey by what3words, a quarter of travelers now want to visit remote or challenging locales. As that demand grows, you can expect technology to make even the most far-flung experiences possible.

Bon voyage.