The 'Matriarch Trip' Trend Proves That Mother Knows Best

Leti Muñoz keeps a glass jar of sand and a shell from Utah Beach, France, on her ofrenda. She brought them home in April after traveling with her mother to the stretch of Normandy's coast where Muñoz's grandfather had landed during World War II. The two women enjoyed three weeks of traveling in France and the UK, but Utah Beach was the place they'd really gone to see.

Leti's mother Teresa had imagined the visit for years. “It was a significant place in my father’s life,” she says of her late dad. “I wanted to walk in his footsteps.”

Yet when she talks about her favorite memories from the trip, it's drinking Champagne with her daughter at the top of the Eiffel Tower that comes to mind first. It was the cherry on top of a day spent wandering through Paris with nowhere in particular to be. “I don’t think we stopped talking the whole time,” Leti says. Following Teresa’s wish to see Utah Beach had been the inspiration for the three weeks of exploring together, but it led to far more than the shore they’d come for.

That’s a consistent element of what has become known as the “matriarch trip:” a family vacation built around a mother or grandmother’s choice of destination, giving the places and experiences that matter to her top billing on the itinerary. It could mean going back to the neighborhood where she grew up, following a piece of family history overseas, or finally booking the wish-list trip she’s always wanted to take. For her family, it’s a chance to see either follow an important woman in their life to a place of personal importance—or discover one together.

It also turns a familiar family travel dynamic on its head. Moms are often the ones coordinating vacations on behalf of their family—doing the hotel research, remembering everyone’s preferences, and aiming to please. But that doesn't mean their desires get priority when it comes to choosing the fun stuff. A matriarch trip begins with a different question: Where would she like to go?

Leti and Teresa's experience made me wonder what others have learned from doing just that. So, I spoke with families who have taken matriarch trips of their own, and experts in the space, to understand how to plan an equally impactful trip. One lesson rang consistent: the destination was only part of what made these travels so memorable.

Let her choose the place

It all begins with the destination—but not every family has a Utah Beach waiting for them like Leti and Teresa did. Elizabeth Keating, Ph.D., a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, says that inspiration for a matriarch trip can begin much closer to home.

As Keating points out, adult children often know surprisingly little about the lives of their grandmothers and mothers lived before they had kids. “We don’t [all] ask our mothers and grandmothers questions about what it was like when they grew up, what they wore, what dating or courtship was like, what the house, apartment, or neighborhood that they grew up in looked like, what they were afraid of when they were a kid,” she says. A matriarch trip can be treated as a chance to learn about unknown sides of the women in our families.

As a first step, Keating recommends asking your mother where she would take you if the choice were entirely hers. (If she wants to return to a childhood neighborhood, Keating does suggest some level-setting on expectations first: the place may have changed, or even disappeared.)

For Molly Schoneveld, the answer was Greece. Her mother, Susan, has always been drawn to the water, and had dreamed of visiting the Aegean and Mediterranean for years. The trip had always felt like a distant possibility—never off the table entirely, but life kept getting in the way.

When Molly and her family relocated to North Carolina to live closer to Susan, Molly decided it was time to take the trip. When she told her mom she wanted to plan a visit to Greece, Susan was in disbelief. Unlike Leti and Teresa’s visit to Normandy, there was no family history awaiting them, but Susan’s desire to go was reason enough. Together, the two then traveled to Santorini, Antiparos, and Athens, making their way through the landscapes Susan had long admired in photographs. At Canaves Epitome in Oia, they stayed in a two-bedroom villa with a private plunge pool and patio overlooking the sea. Susan was perfectly content to spend hours beside the water with her daughter—a welcome relief for a woman who’d spent so much of the preceding years caring for other people.

Plan thoughtfully

Handing your mother the reins in deciding the destination doesn’t mean she then has to sort out the trip's logistics. Leti, for example, booked the Normandy portion of their trip through Road Scholar, a nonprofit that organizes educational trips for older adults. She had never traveled with a tour company before, but wanted someone else to handle the admin so she could simply enjoy being with her mom.

Road Scholar’s chief program officer, Maeve Hartney, says the organization has been seeing more groups of adult children and older parents traveling together. In a recent survey organized by Road Scholar, more than 5.5% of participants said they travel with a parent or child at least sometimes, and yet more than half were open to or actively considering a multigenerational trip within the next year.

Traveling together as adults calls for a conversation about pace. Hartney recommends reviewing an itinerary’s activity descriptions with an older parent ahead of travel, paying attention to walking distances, terrain, elevation, long days, and how much free time is built in. Cobblestones, for example, can be more difficult to manage than they may appear to be in the images posted on a pretty hotel website.

Molly was especially mindful of this when planning the Greece trip. Susan needs a knee replacement, and the itinerary would involve an overnight flight followed by three destinations. Molly worked with a travel agent to make the logistics as seamless as possible, and she deliberately chose two bedrooms so that they each had privacy. In Athens, with Susan determined to visit the Acropolis despite her knee pain and fear of heights, Molly arranged a private guide to ensure they made it to the top.

The same principle applies when age and mobility aren’t concerns. Ask whether your mother, grandmother, or aunt would enjoy a fully guided day or enough flexibility to get lost for a while. Would she be happiest with a detailed plan, or one reservation and the rest of the afternoon open? What does she actually want to eat and see? A trip organized around her interests should leave room for yours, too, but the point is to resist quietly turning her dream vacation into everyone else's preferred itinerary.

Create space for meaningful conversation to flourish

A sense of curiosity and openness can make for a meaningful trip once you arrive in the chosen destination. Karl Pillemer, a Cornell University professor who directs the Legacy Project, has interviewed more than 1,000 older Americans about the lessons they’ve learned in their lifetime. He says many feel their children rarely ask those deeper questions. His advice is to move beyond asking ‘what happened’ and instead ask how an experience made a family member feel, what they learned, or what they might have done differently in retrospect. Those requests give a parent room to tell you what they think, rather than recite a family chronology, which can create a deeper sense of connection.

If you’re walking down a street your mother used to know, Keating suggests asking about what was there when she was younger, or where she spent time with friends. Give her a minute to think. You can learn about the place before you go and bring a few questions, but that also doesn't mean you need to turn every coffee break into an interview. A familiar setting may bring memories back without any prompting.

Keep the conversation going once you return home

Leti and Teresa’s trip didn’t end at Utah Beach. Since getting home, they’ve driven from LA to San Diego to visit scenic gardens, having discovered a mutual appreciation for them on their trip. For Christmas, they’re going to New Mexico, where Teresa’s parents were from. Teresa now encourages Leti and her brothers to keep telling their grandfather’s stories and cooking with Hatch chile, a family tradition. On her part, Leti has requested her grandfather’s Civilian Conservation Corps service record so she can learn what he worked on at Bandelier National Monument before an upcoming visit.

For Molly, traveling with her mom created new memories and inside jokes at a stage of life when those shared experiences have become harder to come by. Throughout their time in Greece, they toasted Susan's late husband, Jack, imagining how much he would have loved the trip—and how much he would have complained about the price. The memory of him became part of the experience.

“You need more than a dinner here and there if you want to build a relationship,” Molly says. She believes that finding opportunities to experience something new with a parent matters. “Words can't begin to describe it,” Susan says of Greece. “It was the trip of a lifetime, and a trip I never thought I would be able to experience with Molly.”

What’s stayed with me about both journeys is their differing origins—one mother wanted to walk the stretch of coast where her father had once stood, while another wanted to see the blue water she'd spent years admiring from afar. The destinations varied, but both trips gave these women the rare pleasure of having their wishes shape the experiences—and allowed their daughters to know them in a new way.

I want to see more of the world with my mother, and I want my daughter there with us, so she can hear what her grandmother notices and see what it unearths about me. We still don't know where that will be but, years from now, I know it'll be the source of memories she'll cherish.