General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Reluctant Traveler

The Reluctant Traveler is a travel documentary series on Apple TV+ hosted and executive produced by the Canadian actor and comedian Eugene Levy, who visits destinations around the world while openly admitting that he does not enjoy traveling. The series was ordered by Apple TV+ on November 1, 2021, premiered on February 24, 2023, and has run for three seasons, with an eight-episode fourth season announced on June 16, 2026.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Format	Travel documentary and comedy series, TV-PG, episodes of roughly 30 to 40 minutes, produced for Apple TV by the British company Twofour²^•³
Host	Eugene Levy, Emmy Award winner known for Schitt's Creek, who also executive produces¹
Seasons	Season 1 (8 episodes, February 2023); Season 2, Europe (7 episodes, March 2024); Season 3, Bucket List (8 episodes, September 19, 2025); Season 4 (8 episodes) announced June 16, 2026⁴^•²
Season 1 destinations	Costa Rica, Finland, Japan, Italy, the Maldives, Portugal, South Africa, and Utah in the United States⁵
Season 3 guests	The Prince of Wales, Michael Bublé, Sarah Levy, the K-pop group NOWZ, and former cricketer Rahul Dravid⁶
Awards	Best Travel/Adventure Show and Best Unstructured Series at the Critics Choice Real TV Awards; Best Variety or Reality Show at the Imagen Awards; Emmy nominations for Outstanding Hosted Nonfiction Series or Special and Outstanding Writing for a Nonfiction Program²
Availability	Streaming on Apple TV in over 100 countries and regions, at $14.99 per month with a seven-day free trial²

Spoilers

Season 1 (2023)

The eight-episode first season premiered on February 24, 2023. Levy swims in a frozen lake in Finland, walks through slot canyons in Utah, and explores a rainforest in Costa Rica, and also visits Italy, Japan, the Maldives, Portugal, and South Africa, going on safari along the way.⁵ Levy consulted on the list of possible locations and said he got more adventurous each time.⁵ The season holds an 87% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.⁸

The composer David Schweitzer, who had known Levy's work from the Christopher Guest films and Schitt's Creek, wrote the score, recording it with a live orchestra at Abbey Road One over several days in 2022, with each episode's music flavored by its location around a central theme.⁹

Season 2 (2024)

The second season, subtitled Europe, premiered in March 2024 with seven episodes. Rather than the continent's most touristy cities, the route ran from the northernmost reaches of rural Sweden to Tarifa, the most southerly point of Spain.¹⁰ Featured accommodations included the German wellness resort Lanserhof Sylt, where guests check in for days of fasting and detoxing.¹⁰

The season also turned personal. In the episode "Scotland: My Mother's Country," Levy traveled to Glasgow, his mother's birthplace, for the first time, explored a replica of the tenement where her family of eleven lived in three rooms, received a kilt in his family's Scottish crest and a Jewish tartan, and visited his great-grandfather's grave.¹¹^•¹² Levy said he had not known about the genealogy element until he arrived, and called the experience emotionally fulfilling.¹¹

Season 3 (2025)

Season 3, titled Bucket List, premiered on September 19, 2025, with eight episodes following Levy across Austria, Canada, England, India, Ireland, Mexico, South Korea, and the United States as he pursued an "ultimate travel bucket list."⁶ Its most widely covered episode featured a conversation with the Prince of Wales at Windsor Castle, in which William spoke about his family, his fatherhood, and his vision for change; Levy later said the Prince was setting the tone for a down-to-earth monarchy.¹³ Other guests included Michael Bublé, Levy's daughter Sarah Levy, the K-pop group NOWZ, Rahul Dravid, singer Eric Nam, and England cricketer Jofra Archer.⁶

Season 4

Apple TV announced the fourth-season renewal on June 16, 2026. The new eight-episode season will follow Levy as he says "yes" to the kinds of travel experiences he has spent a lifetime avoiding, with more special guests to come. Levy said in the announcement that after three seasons he had begrudgingly accepted that saying yes to new experiences is not necessarily a bad thing, and had committed to saying yes a little more often, a strategy he was approaching with considerable caution.²

Origin of the series

The premise came from Levy's own reluctance. The show was first pitched to him as a travel program about exotic hotels, provisionally called A Room With a View. Levy told his agent he did not enjoy travel and could not see how he would hide that, and declined. On a follow-up phone call with Apple, he listed his reasons for refusing, and the listeners laughed; the response was that this was the show, a travel series hosted by somebody who does not like travel.⁷ Executive producer David Brindley recalled that he and Apple executive Alison Kirkham were on that call trying to lure Levy into hosting a travel show while he explained he was the wrong man for the job.⁵

Levy's stated disqualifications became the show's comic engine. He told the Associated Press that he does not love traveling, has a very low sense of curiosity, and does not have an adventurous spirit, adding that he had wondered whether those were not exactly the things needed to host a travel show.⁵ In the original 2021 announcement, Apple described a host who would visit remarkable hotels and the people, places, and cultures around them, provided he did not have to battle his motion sickness and still got dinner at 7.¹

Production and reception

The series is produced for Apple TV by Twofour. Its executive producers across the run have included Levy, David Brindley, Nic Patten, Lily Fitzpatrick, Iain Peckham, Sara Brailsford, and Adam Barry.²^•⁶ Brindley, Twofour's chief creative officer, is responsible for choosing destinations and itineraries, much of which remains a surprise to Levy until he is on the plane.¹⁰

Critics have generally received the show well. Apple's press materials quote reviews calling it "dazzling, delightful ... and gorgeously filmed" and "perhaps the perfect blend of travel documentary and pure comedy."² TechRadar noted it as one of the few reality series on a service otherwise known for sci-fi spectacles and prestige dramas.³ The show has also driven tourism to its featured hotels; Brindley reported that the Kruger Shalati train-on-a-bridge hotel in South Africa and the Arctic TreeHouse Hotel in Finland, the first hotel visited in season 1, both saw visitors arrive because of the series.¹⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026