Publish at April 22 2026 Updated April 22 2026
There's an etymology in the word "tourism" that doesn't lie: the tour, that circular movement that brings us back to the starting point. We leave, we discover, we visit and then we return home. Rest, a change of scenery, then a return to the ordinary. But there's an emerging trend: people don't go home anymore.
Yet they use the same tools as the classic tourist. They book short-term rentals to "test-drive" a neighborhood, they frequent expat Facebook groups like others consult TripAdvisor, they look at Instagram feeds, they scout - the word is revealing - before making their decision. They use the anglicisms lifestyle, quality of life, remote work. They look like they're going on an extended vacation. But in their luggage, something weighs heavier than a suitcase: a life project, a drastic change because they want to leave a situation that no longer satisfies them.
This phenomenon has a name that sociologists are beginning to get to grips with: residential tourism. And it says much more about contemporary society than any official report.
For a long time, we thought we were heading for something: the sun, adventure, exoticism. Contemporary sociology invites us to reverse this perspective. We also, perhaps above all, leave for something far away. Sometimes it's an extrinsic motivation.
This is precisely what Ulrich Beck's thinking on the risk society allows us to understand. For Beck, late modernity is characterized by the production and distribution of global environmental, economic and security risks, which traditional institutions are struggling to contain. The state, the school, the health system, social security: all the collective mechanisms that once structured our sense of protection are becoming more fragile, with a consequent loss of confidence.
In this context, geography becomes strategic. Choosing where to live is no longer just a matter of personal preference or professional chance: it's an act of safeguarding mobility. A family that leaves a major European metropolis for Portugal, Panama or South-East Asia is not fleeing comfort, but rather arbitrating between levels of perceived risk. They choose their exposure to risk.
The most powerful argument in these decisions is almost never financial in the first instance. It's academic.
School safety, in the broadest sense of the term - encompassing the quality of teaching, the chosen social mix, physical safety within the school grounds - has become one of the primary criteria for family relocation (some were traumatized by the scandal in Paris). People no longer move simply for a job. You move for your children's school. The chosen territory becomes a spatial life insurance policy, a sanctuary erected against the uncertainty of a world no longer under one's control.
These new travelers pose a real conceptual problem for the social sciences. They are neither the classic tourist, because they settle here, nor the traditional economic immigrant, because they are not fleeing misery or armed conflicts; they are fleeing discomfort. They belong to the category that researchers Duncan and Hannam have theorized as Lifestyle Mobilities: those lifestyle mobilities where the boundaries between leisure, work and migration blur until they become indistinguishable.
According to this approach, this new type of traveler doesn't see himself as an immigrant. He sees himself as a sovereign actor in his own trajectory, a consumer who evaluates territories as others evaluate products on a market. And this is where residential tourism reveals its profound nature: the territory is first consumed as a tourist destination visited and tested, before being inhabited as a permanent residence.
What these lifestyle nomads are looking for is a rare and precious alignment between three variables:
Portugal understood this long before its European neighbors, with its non-habitual resident status. Mexico attracts with its coliving spaces in Oaxaca and Mexico City. Georgia, Albania and Estonia have developed specific digital offerings. These countries are no longer just selling sunshine: they're selling a lifestyle package, as carefully constructed as a Club Med package, but designed to last much longer than a week.
Paraguay is getting more and more attention on X for its tax advantages, but also for the ease with which it can obtain residency and its low cost of living.
This phenomenon is not limited to economic or security considerations. This is where researcher Anne-Meike Fechter comes in, whose work on expatriate workers shows the extent to which personal and professional considerations are interwoven in relocation projects.
Fechter observes that those who choose to rebuild their lives elsewhere are not simply making a geographical transaction. They are making a declaration of values. Their choices: the country, the neighborhood, the school, the type of professional project developed locally, are expressions of who they are or who they want to become. The entrepreneur who relocates to Panama is not just looking to pay less tax. He's looking for an environment that resonates with his deepest convictions: a certain slowness that he assumes, a different relationship with the community, a life ethic that he could no longer find in his home country.
In its most intimate dimension, this project is a reconstruction of identity. The journey here does not move a body in space: it rebuilds a self in time. These families and entrepreneurs are not on an extended vacation. They are in the process of reinventing themselves, using the territory as a personal construction material. And like all serious identity-building projects, this one requires a secure base, this place, this country, this neighborhood, where you can finally put down your tools and work without fear.
Here we are, back where we started, or rather, precisely where the starting point no longer exists.
Residential tourism is perhaps the most radical response our contemporary societies have formulated to the volatility of the world. Where classic tourism offers a parenthesis, residential tourism proposes a complete rewriting. A pleasant, reassuring and enriching experience, culturally, socially and personally, can no longer be bought by the week. It is built up on a daily basis in a country chosen not by chance, but by conviction.
This shift calls into question the very foundations of the tourism industry. If travel becomes a permanent life strategy, if the destination becomes home, what's left of the tour? Perhaps this: the traveler's spirit. That ability to look at the world with fresh eyes, to question the obviousness of where you are, to never take a territory for granted.
The residential tourist does not return to the point of departure. But they do take with them, everywhere, the posture of the traveler. And this is perhaps the most enduring form of freedom that tourism has ever produced.
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