We’re all going on a ‘double summer’ holiday...
Confused by the volume of ‘out of office’ emails you’re still receiving? Do keep up, says
‘We’re all going on a summer holiday,” Cliff Richard once sang, back in the days before easyjet, Instagram and irritating words like staycation. “No more working for a week or two.” A week or two? Make that a week or six. If you’ve spent the past month watching “out of office” emails pile up in your inbox, you’ll have some idea what I mean. I mean, where is everyone? How can they STILL be on holiday, when their holiday started somewhere back in July? That would be the new “double summer”, as some are calling it: a new trend for Britons to stretch out their summer break beyond all reasonable limits, through some magic mixture of annual leave, unpaid leave, flexi-leave and semi-working leave, not to mention some very skilful, nearacrobatic elongations of the August bank holiday, to max out multiple foreign jaunts.
Forget the old rule that summer holidays last a maximum two weeks. In 2017, figures from the Office for National Statistics, comparing how we holiday now with in the Nineties, showed the number of trips away have soared. UK residents took more than 45million foreign holidays in 2016, up from 27million in 1996. This rise of 67 per cent was out of all proportion to the 12 per cent increase in population during that period.
More recently, the growing emphasis on work-life balance, or the more realistic work-life blend, has likely helped fuel the trend for more time away from the office.
Here’s how the “double summer” is done.
The long break
Not to be confused with the traditional, two-week summer holiday many of us still enjoy.
The long break is a different species altogether, and can last for up to a month. Oliver
Smith, The Telegraph’s assistant head of travel, seems to have got it down pat.
“I took the whole of August off,” he says. “I felt I needed a proper journey, a proper reset, as opposed to one week on the beach.” To this end, he has spent the past month cycling the breadth of France, mostly alone, but for one of the weeks with his wife, having combined two weeks’ annual leave with two weeks’ unpaid leave. Another colleague did something similar, taking her family to her native US for a month using two weeks’ annual leave and an unpaid two-week “sabbatical”. Her rationale was not so much a reset as a childcare dilemma, which was handily solved by putting her two children in the same place as her New Yorker parents.
Audley Travel, a tailormade travel specialist, reports a 160 per cent rise in clients booking trips of more than 30 days’ duration between 2010-18. Its clients typically use their extended time away from home to explore several countries, “although some will fully immerse themselves in just one chosen country and its
Rosa Silverman
culture”. According to travel experts, the increase in the “long break” is driven by greater awareness of the importance of personal wellbeing and good mental health. “Longer breaks offer the opportunity to properly relax and disengage from daily routines and office life,” says Jules Ugo, of travel PR consultancy Lotus.
“Three or four weeks away also means there is time to try out a new skill, volunteer for local projects or explore a destination in more depth. This leads to a more authentic holiday experience, which is very much what consumers want right now. Fly-andflop for seven days feels very old school and not very enriching.”
The ‘semi-working’ break
It’s time off, but not as we know it. You’re not in the office, but you’ve promised to be on hand if needed. You’re picking up emails and responding to them. Perhaps you’re doing this for childcare reasons and are in your spare bedroom some of the time, keeping an ear out for the sound of your eldest walloping your youngest with a cushion. Better still, perhaps you’re at your second home in Umbria, laptop on the Wi-fi all day, Aperol in the piazza all evening.
For some, the goal is not so much work-life balance as work-life blend, as technology blurs the boundaries between the two, making it both easier to work remotely and harder to switch off altogether. “The reality for many of us these days is that our professional lives bleed into our personal lives,” wrote Ron Ashkenas, the management consultant, in a
Forbes article on this idea a few years ago. “Maybe we need to accept the fact that the sharp demarcation between work and home is a thing of the past, and that the new normal is a life that integrates home and work more seamlessly.”
And so it is that today we quite often remain in contact with work while taking our children to their dance class, or visiting elderly parents out of town. During the long school break, such a strategy comes into its
own.
Elongated bank holiday family gathering
You’d have been mad not to weaponise that extra day off and really make it work hard for you. Because, if you’re taking Monday off, where’s the sense in coming back to work the next day? Far better to stretch the whole thing out into the week, to allow enough time to drive back from the Cotswolds/devonshire coast/family in deepest Northumbria. No one wants to spend a bank holiday on the motorway, and the schools have still not gone back.
The micro trip
This is the mini-moon to your main holiday’s honeymoon; the hors d’oeuvre to your holiday plat principal. Or maybe the dessert, depending on when you choose to take your little extra trip. Many of those who took their two-week holiday at the beginning of the summer seem to be back on holiday at its tail end. Just a cheeky week to signal the end of the holidays. Until the next trip that is – which has already been planned for October, and maybe a little bit of November, too.