Mateo Wants Offline. I Want a Spa. Both.

Amiga, I need to be honest with you about something: planning a honeymoon when one of you is a travel content creator and the other one genuinely does not care about the Instagram backdrop is, de verdad, its own kind of adventure. Mateo Roldán — my calm, gorgeous, completely-unbothered-by-the-internet fiancé — has exactly one requirement for our honeymoon. He wants to go somewhere "offline." No itinerary, no schedule, no curated content. ¡Increíble! Meanwhile, I have a working spreadsheet with seventeen columns.

To be fair, we both agree on the big things: somewhere beautiful, somewhere that doesn't feel like a repeat of a press trip or a hotel opening, and somewhere that gives us actual space to exhale after what is shaping up to be a ninety-guest wedding in the Riviera Maya in fall 2027. The disagreement — cariño, and it is a disagreement — is in the details. Mateo's version of the perfect honeymoon involves zero cell service and probably some kind of jungle. My version involves a hydrotherapy circuit and a room with a freestanding bathtub that costs more per night than my first apartment in CDMX.

The buena noticia is that nobody is rushing this decision. The honeymoon is genuinely the one part of this planning process where Renata, our wedding planner, told me to just breathe. "You have time," she said. "Book the venue first." So the shortlist stays at three destinations, I keep my spa column in the spreadsheet, and Mateo keeps sending me photos of places that appear to have no road access. This is love, apparently.

Why Mateo's "No WiFi" Dream Is Harder to Argue Against Than I Expected

Let me tell you how this conversation started. We were at dinner in CDMX — a Tuesday, nothing special — and I pulled up my honeymoon shortlist to show Mateo the updated version. He looked at it for maybe four seconds, set my phone face-down on the table, and said, "What if we just went somewhere nobody could reach us?" And the maddening thing, la verdad, is that I didn't have a fast comeback. Because after thirty-seven posts on luxesofia, two hundred hotel check-ins, and a Paris proposal that I documented in approximately forty-three photos, the idea of a trip that belongs only to us hit somewhere real.

Mateo's case is simple and annoyingly coherent. He argues — and he's not wrong, ¡ay! — that every trip I've taken in the last four years has been, at least partially, content. Even the ones I didn't post about, I was thinking in captions. He wants our honeymoon to be the first trip I take where I'm not framing the light. He's not anti-travel, he's anti-performance. Coming from a boutique-hotel design consultant who has spent his career making spaces look beautiful, that's a very specific kind of conviction. I respect it. I also find it slightly terrifying.

The destination he keeps circling back to is somewhere remote — we're talking a property accessible only by small boat, with a strict no-laptop policy and a spa menu that's one page long. I've written before about why Mateo's offline instinct and my content-creator brain are genuinely at odds, and I won't re-litigate the whole thing here — but the short version is that he has a point, and I hate that he has a point. ¡Qué lindo y qué frustrante at the same time!

The Spa Requirement Is Non-Negotiable and I Have Numbers to Prove It

Here is my counterproposal, and I think it's very reasonable, amiga: I will go offline — genuinely, not performatively — if the property has a world-class spa. Not a "wellness area with two treatment rooms." I mean a full hydrotherapy circuit, a minimum of six treatment options, and at least one signature massage that runs ninety minutes and involves volcanic stones or cenote water or something that costs $280 USD and is absolutely vale la pena. That is my one non-negotiable. Mateo can have the jungle. I want the bathtub and the plunge pool.

When I started actually researching what "world-class spa in a remote boutique property" costs at the honeymoon tier — cariño, the numbers were a moment. We're talking room rates between $850 and $1,400 per night for the kind of property that satisfies both of us: remote enough for Mateo, spa-serious enough for me. At seven nights, that's a base cost of roughly $6,000 to $9,800 before flights, treatments, or the inevitable upgrade Mateo will somehow negotiate because he knows how hotels work from the inside. ¡Qué caro! But also, it's our honeymoon, so I've made peace with the number in a way I have not made peace with, say, the chair rental invoice from the venue.

The three destinations still on my shortlist each have a version of this balance. One is in the Maldives — Mateo's top pick, genuinely no WiFi in the water villa, spa that runs eight treatments deep. One is in the Azores, which gives us the remote-island energy with a geothermal spa situation that I find personally thrilling. The third is back in Mexico, a property in Baja California Sur that's only accessible by a forty-minute drive on an unpaved road and has a temazcal on-site, which honestly might be the most "both of us" option on the list. As I've laid out in my running shortlist update, I'm not sorry it's still three — because narrowing to one before we've toured the Riviera Maya venue feels like rushing the wrong decision.

How We're Actually Negotiating This Without It Becoming a Thing

The practical question is how two people with genuinely different honeymoon instincts land on one destination without one of them silently resenting the other on night three. De verdad, I've watched this happen to amigas — one person wanted adventure, one person wanted rest, they compromised into a trip that was mediocre at both, and nobody said anything until the flight home. Mateo and I decided early that we'd each make a list of five things that were absolutely required, and five things we could genuinely let go. No negotiating on the required list. Everything else is fair game.

His required list: no mandatory activities, no group dining situations, no schedule posted at the front desk, at least one meal on the beach, and a room with an outdoor shower. My required list: spa with a hydrotherapy circuit, a bathtub (non-negotiable, I've been clear), strong coffee available before 7 a.m., a bed that faces something beautiful when you wake up, and — here's my one concession to content — one afternoon where I'm allowed to take photos with no commentary from anyone. He agreed immediately. ¡Increíble! That last one was the easiest yes he's ever given me.

What's interesting is that once we mapped it out this way, all three shortlist destinations actually clear both lists. The real differentiator now is the flight — the Maldives is a brutal journey from CDMX, the Azores is two connections, and Baja is ninety minutes. Given that we'll be coming off a wedding weekend in Tulum, the idea of a ninety-minute flight to decompress is gaining ground fast. If you want to understand the bigger framework I've been using to think about this — the difference between a trip that's built around guests and a trip that's actually about the two of us — that guest trip vs. honeymoon distinction is worth a read, because it genuinely changed how I framed the whole shortlist. No decision yet, pero we're getting closer. Mateo has started researching the Baja property's spa menu, which I'm choosing to read as a very good sign.

Bride in progress, amor en construcción.
— Sofía

Bride in progress, amor en construcción.
— Sofía