Successive interventions designed to curb the spread of COVID-19 have all served to exacerbate the demands placed upon informal carers, a population indispensable to health care systems. The need for breaks from caring has never been so pronounced. This paper adopts, and extends, the theory of hierarchical leisure constraints to better understand barriers to tourism respite participation. Lived experiences are collected via story-telling techniques (n = 157) from carers taking trips of one night or more away during times of palliative and end-of-life care. Three cross-cutting constraints are emergent in the data: awareness (knowing); access (doing); and anxiety (feeling). Negotiation strategies are suggested, hierarchical implications questioned and the opportunity to explore a temporal dimension to tourism constraints in future research signalled. An extension to constraints negotiation theory: respite care. Display omitted •COVID-19 has exacerbated the demands placed upon informal carers.•Awareness, access and anxiety limit carer participation in respite breaks•Tourism offers salutogenic benefits at a time of critical need.•Pathographies, stories of illness, offer tourism insights too