Why Twenty
For four years, we ran journeys nobody could book. Eight of them, three hundred explorers,
half of whom came back. Here is what those years taught us – and why every
SoulTales circle stops at twenty.
By Preeti Toraskar · Founder, SoulTales
Before SoulTales had a website, it had a waiting list.
Not the manufactured kind. For four years, the journeys I designed were never advertised, never posted, never available to anyone who simply wanted to pay for one. They filled the old way – someone came, someone told someone, someone asked to come back and bring a friend. Eight journeys. More than three hundred explorers. And the number I am quietly proudest of: one in every two of them travelled with us again.
People sometimes ask why we stayed private so long. The honest answer is that I wasn’t withholding anything – I was learning. A journey looks simple from the outside: a route, some hotels, a group. But a circle – a group of strangers that becomes, within days, the safest and most alive room its members have stood in – that is a made thing, and I wanted to understand how it’s made before I put my name on it publicly.
Here is some of what eight journeys taught me.
The third day is the real product
Every journey has a honeymoon: the first two days, when the newness does all the work. Any decent operator can deliver day one and two. The third day is where journeys are actually won or lost – the novelty has settled, the small frictions have surfaced, and the group either begins turning into a circle or begins politely fragmenting into pairs and phones.
Almost everything we now do differently exists because of third days. The deliberate empty hours – because a schedule with no gaps gives people no room to find each other. The long shared drives – because a road with nothing to do on it is where strangers become companions. The one unstructured evening early on, placed exactly where the fragmenting would otherwise begin. None of this appears on an itinerary as a highlight. All of it is the highlight.
Circles form; groups are assembled
The second lesson cost me the most to learn: who is in the room matters more than anything the room contains. One mismatched participant – not a bad person, simply someone in a different register from the rest – changes the chemistry of an entire journey. Twenty right people create something none of them could have predicted. Nineteen right people and one wrong fit create nineteen slightly guarded people.
This is why there is no checkout page on our site, and never will be. Every SoulTales journey begins with a conversation, and we decline more often than people expect – kindly, and usually by pointing someone to a different edition where they’d genuinely thrive. It isn’t gatekeeping for its own sake. It’s the only quality control that actually controls quality.
SoulTales journeys open with a conversation, not a checkout — every circle is curated by hand, twenty seats, one window a year.
Why the number is twenty
We tried other sizes in the private years. Smaller groups – twelve, fourteen – are lovely and intense, but fragile: one person’s off-day tilts the whole room, and there isn’t enough variety for people to find their people within the group. Larger groups – we brushed against thirty once – stop being a circle at all. Past a certain size, a group develops an audience and performers, a front and a back, people who speak and people who watch. The thing we exist to create quietly dies.
Twenty, it turns out, is the widest a circle can be while remaining one conversation. Large enough that every explorer finds two or three companions who feel like theirs; small enough that no one can disappear; and – there’s no romantic way to say this – small enough that I can hold it. I know every name, every story arc of the journey, every person’s third day. At twenty-one, somewhere, I would start to lose one. So the answer is no, we can’t add one more, and yes, we’ve been asked, and yes, it has cost us money. It has never once cost us a circle.
The Honest Answers
Luxury travel upgrades where you sleep. We change what happens to you. Our journeys are built around living traditions - storytellers, artists, craftspeople - with a small circle of twenty, and a quieter inner thread running underneath. The comfort is real; it's just not the point.
High-performing adults - founders, professionals, creatives - who have done everything except pause. You don't need any artistic talent or prior "inner work." You need curiosity, and the honesty to be slightly nervous.
Places where a tradition is still alive, timed to when it's most alive: Morocco when the desert is crossable, Spain in its festival spring, Milan in fashion season, the Himalayas in October light. We go rarely visited, rarely explored ways - and never in crowds.
Gently and mostly invisibly. Our founder is a Master's-level expressive arts practitioner, and every journey is designed so the making, telling, and walking do the inner work - no lectures, no jargon, nothing you'd have to explain awkwardly at dinner. People come home different - not because anyone pushed, but because the journey made room.
Boutique riads, character hotels, private camps reserved entirely for our circle - chosen for soul first, thread count second. Twin-share by default, single rooms available. The one luxury we never compromise: you will not share your journey with strangers outside the circle.