Natalie Robinson, third from right, of Fat Girls Travel, Too!, in Cartagena, Colombia. Photo / Deon Tillman via The New York Times
Natalie Robinson, third from right, of Fat Girls Travel, Too!, in Cartagena, Colombia. Photo / Deon Tillman via The New York Times
Vacation is meant to be relaxing, exhilarating and insert all the other positive adjectives you like, but it is often stressful and disappointing. Travelling while fat can be both of those things, as well as dehumanising and FOMO-inducing.
Actually, plus-size travellers don’t just have the fear of missing out; they’vehistorically had the near guarantee that they will miss out, thanks to fat bias and societal structures that say we are simply too big to have fun. There are the obvious challenges — too-small airline seats, intimidating pools and beaches — but other worries as well: what if the spa bathrobes don’t fit? What if the rides at an amusement park cannot accommodate bigger bodies and the only way to find that out is by waiting in line for an hour and then unsuccessfully trying to board? What if the airline loses your bag and there are no stores at your destination with clothes that fit? (Trevor Kezon, a board member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), said he purposely packs two suitcases on trips because of that distinct possibility.)
Now a small but growing market catering to size-inclusive travel (often aimed exclusively at women) is seeking to bring joy, community and reassurance to people in bigger bodies at price points on par with standard group trips.
The benefits of going on a size-inclusive trip are multilayered, according to participants and numerous tour operators. Emotionally, a traveller knows straightaway that her peers have also chosen a trip designed around body acceptance. She may know that her fellow travellers are probably already somewhat versed in her world, and understand that “fat” as an adjective is a fact, but “obese”, which equates fatness with a disease, and “overweight”, which suggests there is an ideal weight to be, are most likely not welcome. Logistically, it means everything has been planned with accessibility in mind, like dinners at restaurants with chairs that are spacious, supportive and comfortable.
It also means camaraderie. “I cannot tell you for certain that you are not going to get a look, and I cannot protect you from that look,” Zoe Shapiro, founder of Stellavision Travel, which offers a size-inclusive trip to southern Italy, said about travelling while fat. “But you can count on me inserting myself between the group and the gaze. And if I can prevent our travellers from feeling it, either by diverting their attention, having a conversation, communicating in Italian, whatever I can do, I will.”
Even though one-third of the world’s population is fat, according to NAAFA — with fat defined as “exceeding the current medical standard or the current social standard for acceptable bodies”, said NAAFA chair Tigress Osborn — the travel industry has been slow to accommodate. When it comes to adventure-based excursions, like zip-lining and white-water rafting, many bigger people have assumed that exclusionary weight limits are unavoidable and for our own safety. But a zip line can be designed to support any weight. The Chubby Diaries blogger, Jeff Jenkins, whose National Geographic travel show, Never Say Never With Jeff Jenkins, premieres July 9, said that all it takes is an innovative mindset to make activities inclusive: “People move literal tons of lumber with zip lines. No human weighs a ton.”
For some of us, the journey to embracing travel has been interior — celebrating our identity instead of fighting or hiding it — and what a relief it has been to find others already at the destination, happy to guide us. Jenkins pointed to the new crowdsourcing app Friendly Like Me, which was created for people at higher weights or with disabilities (or both) to find out everything they need to know about a place’s accessibility and “friendliness” beforehand.
Here are some travel companies helping to change the landscape.
Stephanie Schneider, an American who lives and teaches in the Netherlands, learns how to make pasta in Rome on a recent Virgie Tovar trip. Photo / Lauren Hanussak via The New York Times
Stellavision Travel
In addition to body inclusion, the Stellavision trip to southern Italy (July 15-29, US$5650* [about NZ$9180]) focuses on hyperlocal tourism, as well as female-owned businesses.
For Sara Courson, who travelled with the 2022 group, that was the main draw — but the size-inclusive aspect was the clincher. “I gained weight during the pandemic, and I had been nervous about going abroad,” she said. Instead of being anxious that people would be irritated by “that one fat lady on the trip”, she was comforted knowing she’d most likely be with people who accepted her.
On the Stellavision trip — which will run again in the summer of 2024, as will a new size-inclusive Italy trip with a route and an itinerary to be determined — there is no specifically body-focused programming. “There were therapy-adjacent-type tools,” said Courson, “but we’re not sitting around talking every meal about what it’s like in our lives.”
And though the trip is not limited to people who identify as plus size, it is meant for those who specifically want to feel secure in their bodies. Weeks before the trip, Shapiro, who lives in Rome, sends participants a survey that asks, among other things, what they’re nervous about. This is so she can address those worries ahead of time.
Of her trip — which is open to “self-identifying women and nonbinary folks who feel comfortable in female spaces” — Shapiro added, “I would never take people’s money and say I am the de facto voice in size-inclusive travel.” Her intention, she said, is simply to present “a more multifaceted experience with all the thoughts and intentionality that our travellers deserve”.
Fat Girls Traveling
Necessity is the mother of invention, and for influencer Annette Richmond, who founded Fat Girls Traveling, it is a necessity to not let sizeist convention stop her from doing every single thing she wants to do when it comes to experience and adventure.
She recounted a trip to Indonesia, where she was excited to experience the Tegalalang Rice Terrace Swing, an endorphin-packing attraction that launches participants over gorgeous rice paddies. Richmond recalls trudging through the mud: “I’m scraped up, I get there to the swing, ready for my debut, and I’m putting the harness around my waist and it does not click. I was like, ‘Dude, why can’t they just get a bigger harness?’” The result? The swing operators apologised and suggested a competitor, Real Bali Swing, which offered larger harnesses.
Now Richmond hosts trips and retreats for other people who are sick of being excluded: “My fat camps, which are like my retreats, those are for fat femmes and nonbinary people,” she said. If she opened up her retreats to everyone, she said, “there is a threat of losing the magic”. From August 25-28, she’ll host Fat Camp UK in Brighton, England (US$2000), which, in addition to summer-camp-style games and pub crawls, will feature fat-positive discussions. Richmond also has a size-inclusive trip to Cuba September 1-5 (US$2750) — without the planned consciousness-raising of the retreats, just pure fun — and hopes next to plan group travel in Mexico, her home base since 2020. (Her trips, unlike her retreats, are open to all genders.)
Nicci Nunez and Alex Stewart met through mutual friends, and in October 2020 started the Swipe Fat podcast, which now has 20,000 monthly listeners. “At that time nobody was doing a podcast exclusively about dating while plus-size” and the particular anxieties in the age of apps, Nunez said. Those anxieties include, Stewart added, “feeling like we had to put photos of ourselves that accurately depicted who we were”.
Their connection and openness on the podcast naturally led the Chicago-based duo to host meet-ups, which led to travel, said Stewart: “We were like, ‘What if we just did a trip somewhere else and then people can come meet us?’” The trips, which do not feature a dating component and are for anyone who identifies as a woman, are planned through TrovaTrip, a platform that teams up with influencers to organise travel. Swipe Fat’s first trip was in October 2022, to Athens and Mykonos in Greece; in June, Nunez and Stewart went to Italy, and they have a Spain trip planned for October 3-9 (US$2595).
Like every other travel coordinator interviewed, they spoke of the instantly magical effect of being around like-minded (and -bodied) peers. “During beach day on our Greece trip, somebody came over and was like, ‘I just want to tell you how transformative this has been.’ That was just three days in,” Nunez said.
Fat Girls Travel, Too!
Ashley Wall (aka simplycurvee), the founder of Fat Girls Travel, Too!, and her business partner, Natalie Robinson, have always been comfortable and confident in their bodies, which they know is not everyone’s experience. The goal of their women-only trips, Robinson said, is for people “to travel unapologetically”. That means loads of research and extremely tight curation by both women to find alternatives to excursions that are not immediately accessible to people in bigger bodies.
The company’s inaugural trip was in 2019, to Havana, where a group will return December 7-11 (US$2500), with Bali, Indonesia, before that (October 1-9, US$3597) and two trips to Cartagena, Colombia, after (December 7-11, US$2550; March 3-8, 2024, US$2950). The number of participants on the tours will range from six to 12, “so everyone feels as though they’re being catered to”, Wall said. One recent Fat Girls traveller, said Robinson, had a groundbreaking experience akin to the one Nunez described: “It was the first time she ever wore a two-piece bathing suit.”
Virgie Tovar
Virgie Tovar, the author of several books, including Flawless: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color, has been hosting trips since 2016, when she teamed up with Tingalaya’s Retreat in Negril, Jamaica. “Every morning we would wake up to this gorgeous breakfast and then walk to our private beach and do stretches and jiggling (clothing optional!),” she wrote in an email from Italy, where she was hosting a size-inclusive tour through TrovaTrip. Tovar started her company as a sole proprietor in 2011, and in 2021 it became Virgie Tovar.
For Tovar, travel is a human right (her trips are for all genders). “If plus-size people don’t feel that travel is approachable or accessible, then we are truly missing out on a very important human experience,” she said.
Tovar has also travelled to Bali, and hosted San Francisco and Sausalito, California, retreats called Camp Thunder Thighs. Trip costs are usually around US$2000 for one week, not including flights, with locations determined by her own enthusiasm for them, traveller interest and TrovaTrip surveys of potential participants.
She shared a story from a water ceremony in Bali on her size-inclusive trip in 2022. “In order to participate we had to wear sarongs with sashes. Many people in the group were afraid that the sashes or sarongs wouldn’t fit them,” Tovar said. “I knew we could tie sashes and sarongs together to make them accessible. That’s exactly what we did! Everyone participated, and it was one of the most important moments on the trip because it really was a cleansing ritual, where you hand over your worries and grief to the water.”
