Type 2 Travel exists for many different reasons, but here’s the biggest one: the world is wide open, and the people you’d most want to see it with are either busy, tied down, or just not ready.
So the trip never happens. We’re the workaround for that.
We assemble the group, do the months of planning nobody actually had time for, and give you a departure date. All you need to do is book your flight, narrow down the number of shoes you’re going to jam into your carry-on, and land in time for the welcome dinner.
Like most business ideas, though, this one has a bigger story. Scroll down for the full scoop:
Let’s be real about how all of this started.
Nearly a decade ago, I walked into a courtroom and ended my marriage.
The TL;DR of that story is that I had spent the better part of the previous 10 years being in a relationship that had slowly eroded my sense of self.
Then I got divorced, and it felt like every part of my life was marked by what I’d lost—the empty side of the bed, the couples’ dinner parties I wasn’t invited to anymore, and the deep pain of my future suddenly vanishing before my eyes (even if I knew in my bones that the person I was with wasn’t the right person for me).
So when that chapter of my life ended, I did what any newly divorced woman would do:
I panicked about what came next.
I questioned every decision I made.
And then, I bought a plane ticket.
A few of them, actually.
I impulse bought a ticket to Australia one evening in late 2019 because nobody wanted to travel with me. Or, maybe they did, but my friends were all juggling relationships and kids and mortgages and couldn’t fathom putting everything down for ten days to head out on an adventure with their newly single friend.
Australia was everything I hoped it would be. And I did the whole thing alone — I booked it alone, navigated it alone, and stood in front of things I'd only ever seen as screensavers, alone. I’m still proud of that trip.
It also taught me something I wasn’t expecting: I don't love solo travel.
One night in Melbourne near the end of the trip, I was eating dinner alone, and a little bird perched on the empty chair next to me. We split a pizza while, two tables over, a group of strangers laughed. It was that real kind of laughing — someone wiping tears, nobody able to explain what was funny anymore. I watched them the way you watch a fireplace.
The trip wasn't the problem. I just wanted someone to turn to and say "are you seeing this?" Someone to say "remember that one time…" with, years later. Even someone I'd met seventy-two hours earlier. Especially them.
I flew home with two souvenirs: proof that I could see the world alone, and the certainty that I didn't want to.
When the pandemic started to clear in early 2021, travel became possible again, and the Australia trip led me to other places that had my curiosity. Colombia. Mexico City. Turkey.
All were places that I was told were too dangerous for women, especially traveling solo. Each destination challenged me to face my fears head-on, and I’ll just say that the weight of divorce begins to lift when you’re trying to decipher Turkish street signs in Istanbul’s winding alleys.
In each new country, I shed a layer of self-doubt. Somewhere between a mud bath in Cartagena and a cave hotel in Cappadocia, I stopped thinking of myself as “Laura, recently divorced” and started telling stories about the grasshopper tacos I had recently eaten in Mexico (a much better conversation starter, for sure) and the quinceañera I crashed in Bogotá.
Those trips taught me that every time you successfully navigate a confusing metro system in a foreign language or make a new friend in a new-to-you city, you remember who you are and who you’re becoming.
That realization hit hard. Hard enough that by the end of 2021, I traded my safe, well-worn career path in higher education for entrepreneurship—something I knew nothing about. I had so little experience, in fact, that I named the company Laura Ericson Group Trips simply because I couldn't come up with anything better. Naming it after myself wasn't a brand strategy—it was a placeholder so I could get started, and I told myself I'd change it down the road when a name spoke to me.
I launched this company because I wanted to build the trips I couldn’t find. Because back then, “group travel” meant cramped buses of people heading to tourist traps and following a guide with a microphone and a flag.
Yeah, no. Hard pass.
I wanted off the beaten path. Places where we'd be welcomed to somebody's table, not photographing it from across the street. Local guides who start the week as strangers and end it as friends. Small groups that bond by day two — usually over too much wine and an urgent bathroom stop on the side of the road.
Five years in, we’ve taken over 400 travelers to 10 countries and counting. And I've watched people change in all the ways I imagined…and a few I didn't.
Strangers became friends with group chats that are still going, years later.
Two travelers met on one of our trips and got married.
There have been more celebration tattoos than we can count — a surprising number of them first tattoos, on people who'd spent decades saying "someday."
Women in their 60s boarded a plane by themselves for the first time in their lives, and they realized how capable they were.
And people have gone home and walked away from jobs and relationships that were shrinking them. Some came on a single trip and changed the whole direction of their lives — because a week that far from home gave them enough distance to finally see it clearly.
And our travelers are only half the story.
The guides, the drivers, the families who wave us into their homes — they don't just become our friends (though they do, every single time). Every trip creates jobs and keeps money in the neighborhoods we visit, and we've watched partners who started as new entrepreneurs grow flourishing businesses of their own.
We've also put our time and our dollars behind people doing work that matters: supporting acid-attack survivors rebuilding their lives in India, fighting period poverty in Kenya, and spending one very good afternoon walking every stray dog at a Mexico City shelter.
And somewhere along the way, between ATVing across the Sahara and seeing my first lioness up close in Kenya's Maasai Mara, my own life changed too. When I look back at the woman who started this business, I barely recognize her.
Despite being on the road nearly half of every year, and after a long run of failed dates and dating horror stories on multiple continents, I met a man I love and adore…in my cute little Wisconsin city of all places. We moved into a new home together at the end of 2025, and I am so happy to have found someone who compliments me and accepts me for who I am.
For the record, I didn't need a partner. By the time Erik showed up, I'd already built a life I loved, and that was the whole point. It turns out creating a bigger life creates more space, and I'd slowly made room for him without even noticing.
Somewhere in the last year or so, I had a realization. Travel was no longer an exit door or an escape plan for me. It had become part of building and feeding a life I love, not finding a way out of one that wasn't working.
Which meant the company I'd built for a woman on the run no longer fit the woman I’d become.
When the company is your name, you are the company. Every departure, every email, every welcome dinner — people looked for me, expected me, wanted me. Which is flattering, right up until you do the math on being one woman trying to lead 10+ international trips a year and run a full-time business.
Over time, I realized something important: I love travel, but I want a business that supports my life — not a life that exists to support a business.
So I gave it a new name. Type 2 Travel — named for something called Type 2 fun: the kind that's hard, weird, or deeply "WTF?" while it's happening, but hands you the stories you'll tell for decades. Getting demolished by mosquitoes in rainy season in Brazil's Pantanal. Getting mugged by a monkey in Morocco. Watching my friend shit her pants at O'Hare before we even made it to the gate. (Let’s be real, a shocking number of Type 2 stories involve a bodily function.)
I didn't plan it, but Type 2 fun has been underneath every trip I've ever taken and every one I've ever led. I didn't really have to choose the name because it was there all along.
So after five years in business, I finally made a change I’m proud of and a little terrified of: I stepped back from being on every single departure. There’s a team now—trip leaders I trust with the thing I love the most. People who embody the Type 2 ethos because they’ve been on trips with me and have lived many of those moments right alongside me.
If I’m being honest, that’s the most “Type 2” thing I’ve done: I finally let go of the handlebars.
Because ultimately, I never wanted this business to be about me.
I wanted it to be about you, the places you go, and the stories that happen when your overlanding truck sinks into a ditch during a Kenyan flood and you stand on the side of the road singing Hakuna Matata at the top of your lungs while a group of men try to heave it out of the mud.
(I mean, just as an example. Not that it’s ever happened.)
Those are the stories you’re going to tell five months, five years, and five decades after the trip.
~ Laura
Sound like fun? Check out where we’re heading next—and meet the team taking you there.
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