Beyond the Backyard: Why We're Taking Sauna Culture Abroad

For the past few years, Howl at the Moon has shown up in backyards, on beaches, and in fields across West Michigan. The Wildflower rolls in, the fire gets lit, and for a few hours, people put their phones down, sink into the heat, and find their way back to themselves and to each other in ways they didn't know they were missing. That part of the business isn't going anywhere. It's still the heart of what we do here at home.

But somewhere along the way, I started asking a bigger question. If a wood-fired sauna in a Rockford driveway can make people feel this connected, this at ease, this human, what happens when you take that same practice to the places where it actually comes from?

That question is what led us to Iceland, and it's the reason Howl at the Moon is growing into something new: small-group bathing culture trips abroad.

The Driver Behind This Shift

I didn't set out to become a travel company. I set out to help people feel less alone. The mobile sauna was always a means to that end, not the end itself.

What I noticed, session after session, is that the sauna itself is almost never what people talk about afterward. They talk about the conversation that happened on the bench. The way an hour of heat and quiet made room for something they'd been carrying to finally settle. The “blissed out” feeling after the session was through.

That's the thing sauna does. It's about what the heat makes possible.

And the more I dived into understanding bathing cultures around the world, in Finland, in Iceland, in Japan, in Turkey, the more obvious it became that this isn't a Nordic quirk or a wellness trend. It's one of the oldest, most consistent human technologies for connection we have. Taking people into that world directly, not a replica of it, but the real thing, felt like the natural next chapter.

Why This Kind of Travel Is Different

Most travel is designed around seeing things. This is designed around feeling things, together.

A small-group bathing trip isn't a bus tour with a spa stop. It's a handful of people, intentionally kept small, moving through heat, cold water, food, and conversation in a place where that rhythm has existed for centuries. You're not watching a culture from behind glass. You're sitting in it, sweating in it, easing into a plunge pool with people who were strangers three days ago.

There's an education in that you can't get from a guidebook. You start to understand why a culture bathes the way it does, what the cold means to people who've lived alongside it their whole lives, why the conversation after the sauna often matters as much as the sauna itself. It's sensory and it's social, and both of those things stick with you.

What the Data Is Telling Us

I don't need a study to know that people are craving this, I’ve been watching first hand as I host the Wildflower mobile sauna across the state. But, the numbers back it up too.

A 2024 Pew Research survey found that roughly one in five American adults reports having no close friends, a share that has roughly doubled since the early 1990s. We are, by the numbers, one of the most connected generations in history and one of the loneliest.

At the same time, the global wellness tourism market is projected to roughly double over the next decade, and a meaningful share of that growth is coming from people who aren't looking for a facial. They're looking for something that helps them feel like themselves again. People are actively seeking out experiences that offer real rest, real presence, and real connection, not another item to check off a productivity list.

Those two numbers sit next to each other for a reason. We've built a world that's efficient and isolating in equal measure, and people are starting to travel specifically to undo that, at least for a week.

Where Bathing Culture Fits Into This

This is where I think bathing culture has something most wellness travel doesn't: it isn't passive.

You're not being treated. You're participating. Your in it, with everyone. You brace for the cold, you sit shoulder to shoulder with people and let the silence be comfortable instead of awkward. It asks something of you, and that's exactly why it works. Care and connection have to be practiced, and bathing culture has been practicing them for a very long time.

That's the throughline between a Tuesday night sauna session in Rockford and a week in Iceland. Different scale, same idea. Slow down. Get warm. Get cold. Talk to the person next to you. Let something settle.

Iceland: Where This Begins

Our Icelandic Bathing Expedition is the first place we're taking this idea fully abroad, and it's built around water in every form Iceland has to offer: geothermal lagoons, wild hot springs, historic pools, and the parts of Icelandic bathing culture that most visitors never see because they're not looking for them.

We keep the group intentionally small and settle into one home for the week, a private lakefront property in southern Iceland with a sauna looking out over the water and a geothermal soaking pool steps from the door. There's no packing and unpacking every night, no rushing between stops. The days move at the pace of the water itself: sauna, plunge, a slow meal at a shared table, conversation that goes somewhere real because nobody's in a hurry to leave it.

People come on their own more often than not. They leave as a pack.

We can't promise the northern lights, but southern Iceland in November puts you in about as good a position as you'll find to see them, on top of everything else the week offers.

If you've ever felt the particular kind of ease that comes from a good sauna session and wondered what it would feel like stretched over a full week in a place where that feeling is woven into daily life, this is that.

We're Not the Only Ones Thinking This Way

SaunaNews picked up on our Iceland trip back in May, and one line from their piece has stuck with me since: it's the kind of trip more sauna businesses with a community at home ought to be thinking about.

They're right, and I don't think it's a coincidence. The US mobile sauna world is still young. Most of us started in the last five or six years, out of trailers and trucks and backyard builds, figuring things out as we went. But a lot of us have spent that time building something more than a rental business. We've built regulars. People who show up every week, who know each other, who trust us to lead them somewhere new.

SaunaNews pointed to Cedar Grove Sauna in Maine as another example of this instinct, just moving in the opposite direction. Jackie Stratton, who runs Cedar Grove out of a wood-fired compound and a couple of mobile rigs on the coast, spent six weeks in Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, and Sweden studying Baltic bathing traditions. Instead of packaging a trip back for her guests, she brought a piece of that tradition home, hosting two Lithuanian bath masters for the first pirts training ever held in North America.

Different shape, same idea. She went and brought it back. We're taking people with us. Either way, it's what happens when a sauna business stops thinking of itself as a rental service and starts thinking of itself as a place people belong to.

That's also part of why our Iceland itinerary leans into gúsa, a three-round sauna and cold-plunge ritual out of Reykjavík that's barely two years old as a formal practice. It would have been easier to default to something more familiar, a straightforward Finnish löyly session everyone's heard of. But gúsa is what's actually happening in Icelandic bathing culture right now, and I wanted our guests experiencing the real, current thing, not a greatest-hits version of Nordic sauna.

What Comes Next

Iceland is the start, but West Michigan is still home. The Wildflower still rolls out to homes, and offers unique opportunities to sweat with others at the beach and in the forest, and that's not changing. But I've spent enough time now talking to people in bathing cultures around the world to know there's a lot more worth exploring together, and I intend to keep going.

If any of this is resonating, that's usually a sign it's for you.

Learn more about the Icelandic Bathing Expedition →

With warmth,

Alisa- Founder, Howl at the Moon Sauna Co.

Do less. Bathe more.