Subject: Summer Deals on All-Inclusive Vacations

From: "All Inclusive Vacations" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2015 17:44:27 -0700

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assigning each family its own "Girl Friday." Vacations are a chance to take a break from work, see the world and enjoy time with family. But do they make you happier? Researchers from the Netherlands set out to measure the effect that vacations have on overall happiness and how long it lasts. They studied happiness levels among 1,530 Dutch adults, 974 of whom took a vacation during the 32-week study period. The study, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life, showed that the largest boost in happiness comes from the simple act of planning a vacation. In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks. After the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for most people. How much stress or relaxation a traveler experienced on the trip appeared to influence post-vacation happiness. There was no post-trip happiness benefit for travelers who said the vacation was ???neutral??? or stressful.??? Surprisingly, even
those travelers who described the trip as ???relaxing??? showed no additional jump in happiness after the trip. ???They were no happier than people who had not been on holiday,??? said the lead author, Jeroen Nawijn, tourism research lecturer at Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. The only vacationers who experienced an increase in happiness after the trip were those who reported feeling ???very relaxed??? on their vacation. Among those people, the vacation happiness effect lasted for just two weeks after the trip before returning to baseline levels. ???Vacations do make people happy,??? Mr. Nawijn said. ???But we found people who are anticipating holiday trips show signs of increased happiness, and afterward there is hardly an effect.??? One reason vacations don???t boost happiness after the trip may have to do with the stress of returning to work. And for some travelers, the holiday itself was stressful. ???In comments from people, the thing they mentioned mos
t referred to disagreements with a travel partner or being ill,??? Mr. Nawijn said. The research controlled for differences among the vacationers and those who hadn???t taken a trip, including income level, stress and education. However, Mr. Nawijn noted that questions remain about whether the time of year, type of trip and other factors may influence post-vacation happiness. The study didn???t find any relationship between the length of the vacation and overall happiness. Since most of the happiness boost comes from planning and anticipating a vacation, the study suggests that people may get more out of several small trips a year than one big vacation, Mr. Nawijn said. ???The practical lesson for an individual is that you derive most of your happiness from anticipating the holiday trip,??? he said. ???What you can do is try to increase that by taking more trips per year. If you have a two week holiday you can split it up and have two one week holidays. You could try to increase the
anticipation effect by talking about it more and maybe discussing it online.??? Mr. Nawijn said that while he expected the study results to show a prevacation happiness boost, he was surprised that the study showed that relaxed holidays didn???t affect post-trip happiness levels. ???People start working again,??? he said. ???They have to catch up. Usually there is a big pile of work for them when they get back from the holiday.??? SOME PEOPLE LIKE to travel. They love navigating foreign train stations wearing backpacks and clutching phrase books, bound for destinations that remain ???authentic.??? Others merely go on holiday, booking package tours that promise limitless sunshine, food and booze. My husband and I have long counted ourselves (smugly) in the first category. But early this year, a particularly grueling winter got the best of us???we needed to get out of New York City, and fast. One frigid March morning, we clicked on the all-inclusive section of the booking site Cheap
Caribbean.com. A few weeks later we were lying in the sun, daiquiris in hand, as a sunburned German in a Speedo argued with a pool attendant over how long you could lay claim to a lounge chair by leaving your towel on it. We were at a seaside hotel about 15 miles southeast of La Romana, one of the larger cities in the Dominican Republic???but we could have been almost anywhere sunny. Inside the immaculately landscaped compound, stout swimmers from the former Soviet Union tapped cigarette ash into the infinity pool. Midwesterners hooted as the bartender sloshed refills into their insulated travel mugs. British pensioners cast baleful glances at children splashing around a good-humored hotel employee. It was a considerable departure for us???and it was heavenly. We tend to cram as much as possible into our vacations. That means hustling from an ethnic eatery to a museum to some outdoorsy activity like kayaking or bird-watching. We usually stay in apartment sublets. Sure, it???s reward
ing. But it takes time to arrange. And last winter, planning was the last thing I felt like doing. Enter Dreams La Romana Resort & Spa, whose palm trees and azure swimming pools beckoned from the computer screen like a chlorinated Shangri-La. It resembled a fairly posh Florida condo complex.