Foreign Perspectives

I was reminded by Jimmy over at Your Credit Advisor the other day that Americans and Europeans treat holidays in very different ways and as my readership is split more or less equally between the two, I thought I’d share some thoughts and ideas that us Europeans have which could be even more useful to the American readership in a little series on holiday/vacation planning.

Where you should go is really determined by how much time you have available. That in turn creates five basic types of holidays:

1. Daytrips.

2. The short break consisting of anything from a few days up to about a week.

3. Normal holidays, usually 10 to 14 days.

4. Extended holidays of three to six or seven weeks.

5. The “big trip” of several months to a year or more.

In practical terms, the big trip type holiday is almost always best considered as a series of extended holidays with 4 to 6 weeks in each location. Usually this is limited to students on their gap year although retired people also take similar scale holidays. The world is your oyster with this scale of holiday but in practice most people seem to give a theme to their big trip so you could have someone staying in various countries in the far east, or perhaps a series of essentially citybreaks around the world, exploring Africa, etc.

Whilst our American readership probably counts 3 weeks as an extended vacation, in Europe almost everyone gets four weeks vacation time per year (not counting public holidays) so it’s quite common for Europeans to take quite substantial holidays as a matter of course each year.

Typical extended holiday destinations are vacations like New England, round the world trips (usually with a week or two in each of two or three countries), the west coast of America, Australia, Europe, etc. For this type of trip you need a fairly substantial number of places to go and things to do which, in general, means covering a fairly large area of one or more countries. I separate them out from “normal holidays” because this scale of trip needs a bit of planning to make the most of your time. If you take our New England trip as an example, you’ll see that we needed to work out a rough route and that in turn meant taking the decision that there were various places we’d not be able to see because of the backtracking it would entail to reach them.

Short breaks are just that: a mini holiday. The key thing to note on a short break is that you lose both the first and the last day of your vacation because you’ll be getting to/from the airport. Therefore, a typical long-weekend holiday might count as four days (ie Friday through to Monday) but in reality you only get two of those days at your destination. This means that you’re best to concentrate on a single location for this type of holiday and that in turn usually means a citybreak. Two days in most cities is enough to see the majority of the highlights. However, the short time available means that you will benefit most by researching the location thoroughly in advance. For this, I find that EyeWitness is by far the best series of guidebooks to use as they’re aimed at exactly this market so you’ll find top 10 lists, maps, best restaurants, etc. With the growth in discount airlines in Europe, this type of holiday has really taken off in recent years.

Whilst I’m sure that daytrips in America are always local, it’s possible to take daytrips to various European cities. Normally, these leave the airport very early (6am is common) and return quite late thus giving you a fairly full day in the city that they fly to. Coach trips taking you round most of the highlights of the city are usually included in the price. To make the most of these, it’s best to buy the EyeWitness guidebook for the city a month or more in advance. Bear in mind that you’re not required to take the coach trip. It will almost certainly be the easiest way to reach the city centre but once there be prepared to get off and go around the sights that YOU want to see, which may not be the sights that the trip covers.

Normal holidays are where European and American practice differs greatly. I do appreciate that when Americans come to Europe on vacation that they want to see the “big sights” and make the most of their vacation time, but rather than trying to do Europe in a single two week trip, it’s much better to choose one European country and cover that well. After all, you can always come back. The other problem is that in “doing Europe” in one go, you will constantly be bumping into other American tourists doing exactly the same thing. You’ll see little crowds of them around the Eiffel Tower, the Tower of London, etc. Not only that, but the costs of those “do Europe” trips are VERY high and you don’t really experience Europe culture properly either.

A normal holiday for a European is something like two weeks in a Spanish resort, two weeks in a French villa, perhaps two weeks in Florida. The one thing that they have in common is that on a two week trip, there’s usually only one country involved.

This article is part of our series on holiday planning which covers things like how to book your holiday, how to take your holiday money, what to pack, etc.

2 Responses to “Where should I go on holiday? Where should I take my vacation?”