Want to travel like a local? Sleep in a Mongolian yurt or an Amish farmhouse

At Three Camel Lodge, travelers sleep in yurts in the middle of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. Views just outside of the round, tent-like dwellings feel zapped in from the age of Chinggis Khan: herders driving goats across the steppe, a lone woman trotting by on horseback. 

Three Camel Lodge exemplifies a new boom in culturally immersive lodgings, where hotels and homestays steep guests in a destination’s distinctive architecture, traditions, and food. Call it bed, breakfast, and a crash course in local customs.

“Some sectors of the hospitality industry don’t just want to put heads in beds—they want to make hotels into cultural hubs and places to interact with locals,” says Samantha Hardcastle, founder of the Storied Experience, a travel consulting firm that specializes in creating experiential programs.

A cultural immersion might mean sleeping at a tented Bedouin camp in the Moroccan desert or in an Amish farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. At Three Camel Lodge, guests try Mongolian archery, visit nomadic herders in the surrounding desert, and listen to traditional throat singing after meals in the dining yurt.

Here’s why these rooms with a view of another world are thriving, and how to experience one yourself.

The benefits of cultural immersion

Seventy percent of respondents to American Express Travel’s 2022 Travel Trends Report said they were interested in vacations that featured cultural immersion. “If you have an experience that’s awe-inducing or extraordinary—sleeping in a safari tent in the middle of Africa versus drinking margaritas at a beach hotel—it causes your dopamine and serotonin to rise,” says Paul J. Zak, a professor of economics and psychology at California’s Claremont University who studies the science of immersion. “That creates peak memories which are stored more deeply in your brain.”

Immersive stays are “about getting travelers to experience a place and come back and genuinely be able to say, ‘I’ve been to Guatemala or Northern Thailand,’” says Darrell Wade, the CEO and founder of Intrepid Travel, which includes stays in villages and remote communities in many of its trips.

How to find culturally immersive hotels

Want to make an immersive hotel part of your next trip? Research whether a property or tour company offers genuine interaction with locals and their way of life, and whether the hotel financially benefits the community. 

“You want to feel like you’re visiting a community, and that its people are on equal footing with you,” says Hardcastle. “Look for a place that incorporates locals in a way that has them not catering to you as a tourist but encountering you as a friend.”

(Find out whether travel can make you more empathetic.)

Properties that employ and seek input from locals can provide experiences benefiting both travelers and residents. For instance, Kenya’s Kalepo Camp provides overnight stays in comfortable safari tents near the herding grounds of the semi-nomadic Samburu people. Samburu guides lead bush walks from the camp; guests can also visit community members in their mudbrick manyattas (villages). 

On the lands of the Huron-Wendat peoples of Quebec, Canada, the Ekionkiestha’ National Longhouse is a recreation of a traditional bark dwelling. Guests can stay here, listening to stories from First Nations hosts and sleeping beside an interior campfire.

“When you create spaces that bring people together, it results in what we call ‘euphoric bonding,’” says neuroaesthetics expert Robyn Landau. “That combats loneliness and drives empathy.“

Landau, whose Kinda Studios uses science to study how humans perceive art and other built environments, believes visiting places that feel very far from everyday lives helps travelers truly unplug and “get away from the mental chatter.” 

In other words, a deep dive into another culture amounts to a true vacation.

Hotels that embrace another place

Culturally immersive lodgings usually fall into two types: rustic village stays, where you bunk in simple digs amid a community, and more luxurious hotels where the architecture and programming reflect the destination. The sort of stay you choose depends both on your budget and how adventurous you are.

With higher-end immersive hotels, guest rooms might be situated in traditional dwellings (the vintage wooden Khmer houses of Sala Lodges in Siem Riep, Cambodia) or kitted out with locally made art and furniture (Shinta Mani Mustang in Nepal). 

Activities showcase regional customs and lore. At Guenja The Sámi Ecolodge, an Indigenous-owned property in northern Sweden, guests sleep in cabins with moss-covered roofs and spend time cooking, harvesting crops, and feeding animals (like reindeer) with a herding family.

With a homestay, travelers overnight within the community itself. Experiences include sleeping in small-town guesthouses on Village Ways’ multi-day treks through the Indian Himalayas, where visitors help cook chapatis and learn traditional songs with their hosts. During Intrepid Travel’s “Real Borneo” trips, guests bunk in bamboo huts in the jungle and fish with residents.

(Here are the new hotels Nat Geo loves for 2024.) 

Homestay accommodations are generally clean and comfortable, but, says Wade, “sometimes you might be outside of your comfort zone”—meaning no electricity or hot water for showers.

In travelers’ quests to go deeper and further, these overnight stays might represent the best way to get to know a place. “There’s so much genericness in the hotel business,” says Jalsa Urubshurow, the founder of Three Camel Lodge. “If you highlight local architecture and the local community, it adds another layer to your exploration.”