Welcome To Reroot!

Allow us to reintroduce ourselves…
If you’re receiving this, it is because at one point in time you were subscribed to or interested in a trip by HOW NOT TO TRAVEL LIKE A BASIC BITCH.

but a lot has changed since then…

The Backstory

With the world experiencing significant changes through social activism and a global pandemic in 2020, these have been a traumatic past few years for not only the world but for Doctor Kiona herself with many lessons learned.

Since How Not To Travel Like A Basic Bitch, Doctor Kiona and her team have survived various threats to their physical and mental well-being. If you stuck around long enough, you know that Doctor Kiona survived multiple physical threats to her life. And if you really stuck around long enough, you know that her accusers have since been deported, imprisoned, and declared legally insane.

At the end of that traumatic experience, Doctor Kiona realized there was something inherently wrong with this new brand of social activism being spearheaded over social media. These people said they stood for social justice, but in real life were not doing enough work in the real world to bring about the changes they were calling for. Instead, they were using social media to mobilize millions of people to do their bidding without anyone really knowing who was behind the screen.

In that, Doctor Kiona saw herself…

Like a mirror being held up to what HER real world work was, she looked at How Not To Travel Like A Basic Bitch. The concept was telling people what NOT to do, but really didn’t provide any real world solutions.

As a result, she shifted - completely. She deleted How Not To Travel Like A Basic Bitch and rebirthed as…herself.

Instead of throwing her energy into destructive patterns of criticizing other travellers and their choices, she chose to create an educational travel company based in regenerative tourism. This model addresses the issues that she and her extended family across the world have seen negatively impact communities and provides a non-invasive option to tourism.

Her commitment to becoming the change that is needed in her spaces spawned the new travel company - REROOT.

What is Reroot?

REROOT was derived from a concept stemming from Doctor Kiona’s Hawaiian upbringing. The taro root is the life force of the Hawaiian people and is viewed as their relative. Hawaiians ensure the survival of the taro by cutting and rerooting it so that it can continue propagating and in turn, the taro provides Hawaiian people with food.

Just as the taro must be cut and reroot to continue propagating across land and time, we as humans must reroot by traveling to expose ourselves to new thoughts, people, ideas, and ways of being. This contributes to a development of a higher consciousness that pushes our worlds closer together. Reciprocally, REROOT travellers regenerate the places we visit through strategic cultural, environmental, and economic interactions.

REROOT flips travel on its head. We don’t travel to destinations, we travel through the people. Our philosophy is that travellers are the least qualified to decide where to go and how much to pay. Instead, our local experts decide what you need to know, where to go, and the value of each experience. We prioritize a living education where instead of learning from a textbook written by foreigners stamped in time, we learn from the people, impacted by the issues they personally experience, and actively making a difference in the communities we visit. After all, isn’t it better to be invited into someone’s home?

REROOT seeks to redefine the travel experience by fostering deeper connections with destinations and communities.

Our experiences seek to transform both traveller and destination with responsible cultural exchange that uplifts living standards, respects the environment and communities we explore, and ensures the culture and landscape are preserved and left unaltered by tourists.

Our Impact

One whole year later, we are happy to have tracked REROOT’s impact.

And we’re just getting started!

While we are proud of these numbers, they tell only half the story. For more details of our past and ongoing projects, visit our IMPACT page by clicking below!

We created this newsletter so that we could have more direct contact with you.

With algorithms, lawsuits, trending sounds, hashtags, new social media platforms, etc. we honestly want to go back to what is important. While social media is what brought us all together, we don’t want to spend our time behind a screen. We want real human connection.

So while this may seem like just another email, there’s a real person behind this. Please never hesitate to write back. Or follow us on Instagram @reroottravel where someone will always be there to respond.

We also aren’t trying to bog you down with unnecessary emails, we hope to be a bright spot in your inbox. So you can expect to hear from us when we have another feel-good update on our community members, projects happening on the ground, or at the launch of a new trip, if you’re interested.

If COVID taught us anything, it’s that you can’t replace in-person, human contact. We love receiving your email, DMs, comments and likes but we’d much rather see you on a trip! This is an open invitation to you.

Come see it all for yourself!