Some women are willing to buy a plane ticket and fly to a specific location in order to get their hair styled, and Glamour magazine has published a feature on what it calls “hair travel.” .While this sounds like the ultimate extravagance, some women find that it is actually more cost-effective to travel and get the stylist they trust rather than pay more money to get less-than-desired services in their current location. For example, writer Marcia Noyes compared the cost of getting her hair done in Texas with flying back to see her trusted stylist in Colorado and found the costs were comparable. Now she makes the trip to Colorado every three to four months and is happy with the arrangement.

For women of Caribbean heritage, the issue is even more important. According to Diane Elizabeth, the founder of Skincare Ox, a  lifestyle site, the thick, curly hair that came with her heritage presents problems for many stylists. After months of looking for appropriate hair care and experiencing “dozens of frizzy blowouts,” she still could not find a stylist in her new home of Boston that could perform as well as her old stylist in her previous home of Miami. She decided to fly back to Miami for a “cut and color” when she wanted to look her best for a special event and found the arrangement worked for her. She has kept up the habit since her college days.

Keisha Blair, 40, who is the cofounder of Aspire Canada, makes an even longer trip to get what she wants for her natural hair. The 1,500-mile trip between her home in Ottawa and Jamaica, where she was born, is completely worth it to her. Her friends questioned her decision to fly back to the island to have her hair styled, but Blair wrote on her Facebook page. “I have to admit, I’ve done this several times. However, I’ve done this in cases where I had an event already planned and it just happened to be in that location and so I would simply wait to get my done hair there. This has happened mostly in the case of Jamaica – where hairdressers are amazing and they know all the latest tricks and styles.”