Tag Archives: vacation

America — Overworked and under-vacationed?

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Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur, Mexico | © Greg Gross

So I’m reading this press release about a new pitch being developed by one of the cruise lines, Royal Caribbean International. The theme: “Cruise them or lose them.”

The “them” refers to your vacation days, and the tendency of we Americans to kiss off far too many of them. Yeah, they’ve got cruise ship cabins they’re desperate to fill, but behind the funny pitch are some serious issues.

It’s long been known that the average working adult in the United States gets the least amount of vacation time per year in the industrialized world:

  1. Italy, 42 days
  2. France, 37
  3. Germany 35
  4. Brazil 34
  5. Britain 28
  6. Canada 26
  7. Japan and South Korea, tie 25
  8. United States 13

The Japanese and South Koreans, neither of whom have a reputation for slacking off in the workplace, are the next lowest — and they still average almost twice as much vacation time as Americans.

What’s more, workers in many countries, including Japan, have a certain mininum number of vacation days required by law. Not here.

THE $19 BILLION GIVEAWAY
And of his or her 13 average vacation days, the typical American will give three of those back to their employer. According to the folks at Expedia (another outfit with a vested interest in getting us to travel more), that saves American employers an average of $19.3 billion a year.

Did you even get a thank-you card last Christmas for your share of this $19 billion gift? I’m betting you didn’t.

According to some numbers crunched from 2009 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, we Americans collectively worked through a whopping 459 million vacation days last year.

That’s shade over 1 million years of time off you could’ve taken, America, and didn’t.

It gets worse.

A travel industry survey showed nearly half of those polled, 45 percent, blew off vacation time last year, and 78 percent expect to forfeit ten days of vacation in 2010.

Such surveys have even shown that more than a few Americans actually feel guilty about using their paltry vacation time.

The rest of the world looks at this and thinks we’re nuts. I look at it and think they’re right.

MORE PRODUCTIVE, MORE STRESSED
Nor is this a function of the Great Recession. We’ve always been like this. You know, that whole Puritan work ethic thing? And we wonder why we constantly feel weary in body and spirit?

(Perhaps somebody should’ve reminded our ancestors that the Puritans were religious extremists who basically got run out of England.)

Juliet B. Schor, Harvard economist and author of “The Overworked American,” was tracking this stuff back in 1990:

“Since 1948, productivity has failed to rise in only five years. The level of productivity of the U.S. worker has more than doubled…Yet hours have risen steadily for two decades. In 1990, the average American owns and consumes more than twice as much as he or she did in 1948, but also has less free time.”

We as a nation are among the most stressed out people on Earth, and we have no one to blame for it but ourselves. To paraphrase an old TV commercial from back in the day, we’re creating more and earning more, but enjoying it less.

Some folks, especially those in the mental health business, might well look at all this and wonder: What is the point?

Many of us actually love our jobs; the problem is that the job will never love you back.

KILLING OURSELVES
Face it, it’s not as if your workplace can’t go on without you. The 6.3 million men and women laid off in the last three years can attest to that. So why are you killing yourself for an employer who not only doesn’t love you, anyway, but who may not even know your name?

And if you’re one of those Americans who routinely gives away vacation days every year, you are indeed killing yourself.

John de Graaf runs a non-profit outfit that calls itself Take Back your Time. He has some stats of his own.

“Men who take them are 32% less likely to suffer from heart disease than those who don’t.  For women, it’s 50%.  And women who don’t take vacations are more than twice as likely to suffer from depression.”

So if your doctor ever writes you a one-word prescription that just says “MAUI,” he may just may be trying to save your life.

He who hesitates

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Think it’s too late to book a vacation at a decent price this holiday season? Maybe not.

The Louvre, Paris. I.M Pei's signature glass pyramid serves as the canopy from an underground arcade that includes retail, restaurants, and two Metro stops, not to mention the entrance to the Louvre itself!

Labor Day came, and you waited. Halloween passed, but you waited. Thanksgiving came and went, and still you waited. Now Christmas at hand and you figure it’s too late to book a holiday trip for less than extortionary rates, right? Not necessarily.

Under most circumstances, your best bet is to book sooner rather than later. Sometimes, though, it pays to wait, right up to the last possible moment.

Last-minute travel is a gamble. The stakes are your vacation. Play your cards right and you can come away with a great trip at a great savings.

The key is flexibility, and I mean total flexibility.

VACATION or “STAYCATION?”
Can you leave on short notice? Can you leave and/or return in the middle of the week? Are you willing to use a smaller airport a little farther from home? Can you go a couple of days earlier or later than your original plans called for? Willing to go a long way for a short stay?

If the answer to those questions is yes, you could be in line for some jaw-dropping bargains. On the other hand, if things don’t fall exactly your way, your vacation just became a “staycation.”

That’s the risk you take, and clearly, a gamble of this size is not for everyone.

Many of us are tied to work or class schedules that leave no wiggle room when it comes to travel. The airlines, hotel chains and resorts are fully aware of that, which explains why they jack their rates sky-high during the holiday periods.

Still, when it comes to holiday travel, airlines, hotels and the like aren’t much different from your family during Christmas dinner: Everybody wants to be full. And to get that nice, satisfied “full” feeling, many of them are willing to drop prices on remaining seats, rooms or trip packages.

WEEKEND IN PARIS
This is one of the reasons why you can have three people sitting in the same row in the same class on the same plane on the same day — and no two of them paid the same price for their seat.

Here’s an example from one site, lastminute.com. Leaving from Los Angeles (LAX), a weekend in Paris…this weekend…air, hotel, taxes, everything. When I first clicked on it, it was $996. In the time it took me to click on a different window on my computer and come back to it second later, it had dropped to $956. It could go up again just as fast — and two hours later, it did, to $967 — but that’s not really the point.

So what is the point?

Go to Air France and book an LAX-Paris (CDG) flight for those same days — no hotel, only the flight — and you’ll be paying $4,041. That presumes you’re lucky enough to score the last remaining seats on the cheapest available return flight. If you’re not, the price goes up to $4,606.

CRUISING FOR STEALS
And yes, that’s in Coach. I’d tell you what the Business or First Class fares are for those same days, but I can’t give you CPR through the computer.

Last-minute booking also can yield you a bargain just as big or even bigger on cruises, especially if you live in or close to a port like Miami, New York, New Orleans or Long Beach. If you don’t, there’s a monumental catch that can undo the whole thing.

If you have to fly somewhere to meet your ship, and there are no cheap last-minute airfares left to that destination, any savings on your last-minute cruise booking could be wiped out by the cost of the flights.

The same can hold true with land-based resorts in sun-friendly winter locales like the Caribbean and the Pacific islands. If the last-minute bargain rates doesn’t include airfare, odds are it won’t be a bargain at all.

LOOK AROUND…FAST!
So how do you find the last-minute deals? Same way you find anything else in travel: Shop around. You just may have to do it a little faster this time.

There are Web sites that specialize in this form of vacationing, and their very names will tell you pretty much which ones they are. You’ll find some of them listed on the Cool Travel Sites page.

In addition, airlines, cruise lines, hotels and resorts may offer their own last-minute fare sales, as well as reservation sites that don’t necessarily specialize in last-minute bargains.

As always, ask plenty of questions and know exactly where you stand before you put your money down. One of the disadvantages of last-minute travel is that you’ve got virtually zero time to do damage control if something goes wrong with your reservations, so it’s imperative that you get everything right the first time.

Now that you know some of what to look for, why not prowl the Web a little bit and see what kind of last-minute travel deals you can track down, just for the experience, the practice, the fun? So what if you can’t actually go this time?

Paris — and the rest of the world’s great destinations — will still be there next weekend.