There’s a new travel trend afoot where a big vacation is tightly packed into a very small time frame. Welcome to short burst travel.
A UK company is selling Extreme Day Trips: 24 hours in a new location complete with tours, meals, excursions and return flights. And social media is buzzing with the rise of the one-day overseas vacation. Fly to Egypt, see the pyramids and be back in your own bed 24 hours later.
Sound crazy? That’s probably because it is. But with so much world to see and so little time, the trend is catching on.
According to an article in Slate, “This trend is becoming more and more obvious,” said Becky Liu-Lastres, associate professor at Indiana University’s Department of Tourism, Event, and Sport Management in Indianapolis. Referring specifically to families taking more vacations closer to home and for shorter periods of time, but still getting a kick out of their leisure time.
UTC Travel in the UK is advertising extreme day trips to Barcelona, Milan, Dublin and Geneva which include 1 Destination, 2 Transports plus 1 Activity starting at CAD$200. Sounds affordable and fun - bearing in mind these junkets don’t involve the red-eye, jet-lag effect of an overnight flight.
For those who remember the mid-1990s British sitcom “Absolutely Fabulous”, in one episode the dynamic duo of Patsy and Eddy hop on a Concorde for a boozy 24-hour shopping-spree in New York. Short burst travel is like that. Minus the Concorde and the gobs of money.
One aficionado told Slate author Alex Kirshner, “When you land somewhere and know that your time is fleeting—like, you have only X amount of hours—you don’t allow yourself to feel tired. You just kind of know.”
The implication being that if you don’t know, this extreme form of travel may not be for you.
