Should You Travel on Sabbatical or Stay Put?
One of the first questions you might get asked when planning a sabbatical is where you’re going. Whether you go anywhere at all on sabbatical depends on your goals, but also several personal considerations. Still, in planning your time away, it’s important to decide: Should you travel on sabbatical, or should you stay put?
When it comes to sabbaticals, I think we tend to romanticize the idea of going away. Breaks are framed as escapes, reinventions, or grand adventures, which can leave us feeling like we should come back with amazing stories, photos, and having done something visibly different with the time away.
In practice, the decision to travel on sabbatical or stay home is rarely about travel itself. Instead, it’s a decision based on what kind of work you’re planning, what kind of space you need, and what your life realistically allows at a particular moment in time. Even if you do travel on sabbatical, it can take shape in seemingly infinite ways.
Whether you decide to travel on sabbatical or stay put, your time away can be meaningful. But the decision to travel (or not to) can also undermine the sabbatical renewal you’re hoping for if it’s mismatched with what you actually need.
The Reality of Life Constraints
Before I unpack the pros and cons of traveling or staying put on sabbatical, I first want to name what will most likely determine if you can travel at all on sabbatical, and to what extent.
The reality is that the decision to travel on sabbatical isn’t made in a vacuum. Family responsibilities, caregiving roles, partner careers, health needs, financial realities, visa limitations, and institutional timelines all shape what’s realistically possible.
Sometimes the decision on whether to travel on sabbatical is largely made for you. Maybe you have kids in school, a partner with a job that doesn’t allow them to step away, or concerns about how to budget for a long trip away from home. During my last sabbatical, I needed to provide care for my parents as they both navigated critical health challenges, which limited my ability to travel (and really to plan anything at all).
Constraints like these don’t eliminate sabbatical design. Instead, they define the boundaries within which choices still exist. Hybrid approaches are often possible: partial travel, shorter immersive stays, or creative housing exchanges that reduce costs.
Whatever the constraint, it’s important to remember that even if you can’t travel on sabbatical – or, if you can only travel for a short period of time – your break can still be restorative and successful.
How Your Sabbatical Goals Shape the Decision
In addition to constraints that might shape your ability to travel on sabbatical, another seemingly obvious yet critical consideration is the purpose of your sabbatical.
Sometimes sabbatical goals naturally pull toward a particular environment. Writing-intensive projects may benefit from stability and routine – being based in one place, whether that’s at home or somewhere else. Research that depends on specific data collection sites or infrastructure may anchor you geographically.
Other goals may benefit from disruption and novelty that travel can offer. For example, big-picture thinking, field immersion, identity work, or recovery from academic burnout can often benefit from distance from everyday routines.
And sometimes, the truth is that goals are intentionally open or genuinely unclear. Many people enter sabbatical depleted, unsure what renewal even looks like yet. In those cases, the environment itself becomes part of the design question. You might choose to travel on sabbatical — or intentionally stay close to home — based on where you tend to feel most like yourself again.
Clarity of purpose for your sabbatical shapes whether travel supports or challenges what you’re hoping to accomplish during your time away. It’s why I believe understanding your sabbatical goals is so essential to a successful semester (or year) away.
Traveling vs. Staying Put on Sabbatical
With two of the biggest considerations – constraints and purpose – acknowledged, I’ll unpack what I think are ultimately the pros and cons of traveling vs. staying put on sabbatical.
The Underestimated Power of Staying Put
Staying home on sabbatical is often considered the less exciting option – a conservative choice, or a practical default. But there’s actually a lot of value in continuity.
There are far fewer logistics when staying put on sabbatical. You don’t have to navigate new systems, languages, transportation, or housing arrangements. That mental spaciousness can make it easier to settle into deeper patterns of thinking, writing, or resting that have been crowded by the pace of professional life.
Staying put can also offer emotional safety. Familiar routines, predictable daily structures, and even known healthcare systems can be comforting. For some people, renewal comes less from novelty and more from finally having enough quiet and stability to exhale.
Still, there are real risks to staying put on sabbatical, too. Because you’re in your typical environment, old patterns can creep back in easily. Boundaries between work and rest may blur, especially if you live close to your office. In this way, staying put on sabbatical requires intentional design to prevent it from quietly becoming “more of the same.”
But when matched well to a person’s needs, staying put on sabbatical can create depth, integration, and genuine restoration.
What Traveling on Sabbatical Can Open Up
Traveling on sabbatical offers a different kind of opportunity. New environments can disrupt habits. Distance can loosen routines or thoughts that are rigid at home.
Spending time in new (or less familiar) places can invite creativity and reflection in ways that familiar spaces sometimes can’t. Being somewhere else gives psychological permission to think and imagine differently, which can open doors to creativity and expansion.
Of course, sabbatical travel brings real costs. As I mentioned earlier, logistics consume energy, and decision fatigue can accumulate as you plan (and travel). Language barriers, safety considerations, and financial uncertainty are all taxing enough on their own. Travel can also be isolating and bring up feelings of loneliness, which can be hard when community is a key part of renewal. In this way, what looks expansive on paper can feel surprisingly exhausting in reality.
It’s also important to acknowledge that sabbatical travel can take shape in many different ways. While some people are able to build one home base abroad for their entire sabbatical, others find a balance in spending some time at home, and some time away. There’s certainly no one-size-fits-all approach to sabbatical travel, and that’s okay.
Questions Worth Considering
Rather than rushing toward the “right” answer about whether to travel on sabbatical (spoiler: there is no right answer), it can be helpful to sit with a few reflective questions, such as:
- When have you felt most restored in your life: through novelty or through stability?
- How clear are your sabbatical goals right now, and to what extent does travel fit into them?
- Are any responsibilities anchoring you in this season of life, and how flexible are they?
The truth is, when it comes to deciding whether you should travel on sabbatical, there’s no universal answer. Different sabbaticals – even for the same person – may call for very different designs across life stages. Whether your sabbatical happens across an ocean or right where you already are matters a lot less than whether the sabbatical fits where you are at this moment in your life.
Struggling to decide whether to travel or stay put on your sabbatical? I can help you design a sabbatical that actually works for you – learn more here.
