Those who know me know that I’m a planner. I write a daily to-do list to ensure that everything gets done, I have longer-term lists of everything that needs doing over the next few months and then I plan those things in as much detail as I can. Holidays are no exception. I can be spontaneous (honestly!) – I enjoy just wandering and seeing where we end up, and planning as we go is one of the things I enjoy about camping around France. However, on the whole, my holidays are planned meticulously. I check flight times and prices if it involves a plane; I look for possible stops on the journey if we’re going to be driving. I look at different hotels/campsites/apartments before booking and read reviews to find out more about location, cleanliness, staff, etc. I research all the things there are to do in the area, and often check out places to eat too.
The planning is actually one of the things I like about holidays. If ever I have a momentary panic about the amount I’m spending on one weekend/week/fortnight of my life, I remember that it isn’t just that short amount of time – the impact of a holiday lasts far longer. In addition to the time you spend actually on holiday (still the best bit, obviously), you also get the memories afterwards, plus the lasting wellbeing benefits of having had some time off. Before the holiday, you get the time you spend planning and looking forward to the holiday. If I’m having a bad day, I think about all the exciting things we’ll be doing on holiday. If I’m feeling stressed, I know I’ll be able to forget about my worries for a while when I’m away. If it’s cold, I picture myself lying on the beach in the sun. I enjoy planning what we’ll do and checking out websites for attractions. I like trawling through Twitter, Instagram and travel blogs to find out more information. I check Trip Advisor religiously to read any new reviews for where we’re going. I look at YouTube to see whether there are any videos of our destination, and I even scroll through Google images just for fun. Obsessive, I know (hmmm, wonder where I got my blog title from?!), but it cheers me up.
Of course, as with most things in life, my planning does occasionally have its downsides. The planning has to start before the holiday is actually booked – how else can we decide where to go, where to stay and how to get there? This means that I am initially planning hypothetical holidays… and sometimes I might get just a little bit carried away. Although sometimes I am simply researching flights or hotels for a specific holiday we’re definitely going on, sometimes I have a habit of planning holidays that aren’t definite – or even, on occasion, likely. I’ve done it many times. Sometimes it might be looking in more detail at somewhere that I heard someone mention or saw on TV, for example. Sometimes we might have a bit of extra money (okay, not very often) and I’ll start planning all the exotic places we could go with it. Sometimes my husband or the kids might mention a destination so I’ll look up possible holidays there. Sometimes my planning is relatively sensible – starting to research possible destinations for the summer holidays, for example – and sometimes it’s less so – researching places I’d love to visit and probably never have a hope of actually seeing. I get obsessed with these places (there’s that word again) and bookmark them on Trip Advisor, regularly checking reviews for hotels I’ll probably never visit. I can still tell you the name of the hotel in Cyprus and the one in Mexico* that I was convinced we were going to stay in (but I won’t, because I’ll get sad again).
And it’s that word ‘sad’ that is the downside. Hand in hand with booking any holiday – but particularly a hypothetical one – often goes disappointment. Because that holiday doesn’t always happen. Maybe you haven’t got as much money as you thought you had. Maybe you’re the only one who wants to visit that destination. Maybe the hotel you fancied is fully booked. Maybe the dates don’t fit, the price has gone up or a bad review has changed your mind. Maybe it seemed like the perfect holiday but somehow it’s just not right, or maybe it was a pipe dream that was never going to happen anyway. When your plan for a holiday – or part of a holiday – doesn’t reach fruition, it’s hard not to feel disappointed. If you’re like me, you’ve planned every last detail, looked forward to it and imagined yourself there… and now it’s not happening. And even if you’re able to mitigate that disappointment by booking another holiday – or another element of it – you often find that it just doesn’t match up.
It must be a year ago that we decided to go to Greece this summer, when our youngest expressed an interest in visiting after learning about the Ancient Greeks at school. We talked for a while about where to go – one of the bigger islands like Crete or Rhodes, which we’d already visited but which we knew had lots to do, or one of the smaller islands, which we’d never been to but which might have less to entertain the kids (or us). We opted for Corfu in the end – one of the bigger islands but somewhere we’d only visited once and not seen much of (due to food poisoning – see Corfu – second time lucky?). I started looking at hotels, both through packages and independently, and found one that we all really liked the look of. It was a perfect compromise – big enough to have waterslides and a buffet restaurant but not overly big or ‘British’. The reviews were good and I bookmarked it on Trip Advisor, checking regularly. The trouble was, despite having planned this holiday, we hadn’t actually booked it. We were waiting to have enough money; we were waiting to get my husband’s leave organised; and we just generally hadn’t got around to it. So when we finally went to book the hotel, we were gutted to find that it was already booked up for the dates we could do. It was hard not to be disappointed; we had set our hearts on it and nothing else available ticked all the boxes.
Even more recently, I had the disappointment of the Sardinia holiday that won’t happen. I realised that my husband and I will have been together for 25 years this May – what better excuse for a holiday than a silver anniversary celebration?! I started trawling Travelzoo and Secret Escapes for some exciting cheap deals and found a few possibilities. We found a cheap package to Hong Kong, which we were really tempted by, but we thought that it was maybe a little too extravagant to justify. I started looking at easyJet for prices to various European destinations, and hit upon Sardinia. We could fly there and back for less than £100 each, and hotels seemed to be surprisingly good value. We planned four days over our anniversary, feeling chuffed that it would be both special and affordable. Then my husband went to book the time off work – and it turned out that someone else had already booked that time period and he couldn’t go. Sardinia up in smoke.
Of course, you won’t be surprised to learn that I deal with holiday disappointment in the same way as I deal with anything else that makes me sad – I start planning a holiday. Yes, I know – this is potentially rather counterproductive, but it usually works. In the case of Corfu, having found out that nothing was going to live up to our expectations, we realised that we’d have to change our expectations instead. We decided to forget hotels and look for apartments where we could go self-catering (like all my Greek holidays of years gone by!). We found some nice apartments with a pool and near the beach, with good reviews on Trip Advisor. This time we booked it pretty quickly, to avoid further disappointment, and now I can start planning what to do and where we might like to eat out, given that we won’t have a hotel restaurant (silver lining and all that!). In the case of Sardinia, we realised that no one at my husband’s work had booked off May half-term, so we booked it quickly. We’re now going camping in Dorset with the kids – not exactly the romantic child-free break in the sun that we originally had planned, but I’m now enjoying researching Dorset instead – plus I’m sure we’ll at least fit in an anniversary dinner somewhere.
The moral of today’s blog? Plan away by all means, but don’t invest in it too much if it’s just hypothetical. And if you face disappointment? Planning a holiday always helps…!
* We actually did book that Mexico hotel in the end, for October 2020. No surprises that we didn’t go! It’s rebooked for October this year, so we’ll see…
Diary of a holiday obsessive 