Honeyboomers ditch the kids at home
Parents looking to reconnect on adults-only trips is part of ‘wellness travel,’ expert says
Lisa Pratt and her partner Simon Kingsley recently returned from an adults-only getaway to New York City.
While there, they saw a ParliamentF-unkadelic concert, lingered over a meal at their favourite Greenwich Village bistro and wandered the city without looking at their watches.
“When we travel as a family, there is that sense that you should be doing all of these requisite things — visit the significant landmarks. When it’s just the two of us, we love to just not make any plans and see what happens,” Pratt says. “It sounds a little cliché, but it’s really about taking the time to reconnect.”
Meet the “honeyboomers,” a growing demographic of parents, between 35 and 55 years of age, who are leaving the tween and teenage kids at home while they trot the globe, or at least the continent, on a second honeymoon of sorts.
The catchy buzz term made its debut in an ad campaign for Carnival Cruise Lines in 2016, but the number of couples travel- ling without their children has been expanding for longer than that, with Carnival reporting an 80-per-cent uptick in honeyboomer cruisers since 2013.
And it’s not just on the open waters that parents are packing their bags and ditching their dependants.
“Adults-only is a huge trend right now,” says Canadian travel consultant Claire Newell. A lot of the people who vacation at kid-free resorts are parents seeking a time out. Newell says couples looking to reconnect on a holiday are a “subcategory in wellness travel.”
“They’ve been entrenched in raising their families, and they don’t want to lose touch with their fun sides, whether that means dancing, or just sitting back in lounge chairs,” Newell says.
Certainly not every couple’s dream getaway involves bottomless blender drinks and scheduled salsa classes. But there is a reason that resorts and cruise companies in particular are making a play for the honeyboomer bracket.
“This age group has all the bills coming in at once — car, mortgage, child care and education. Cruising and all-inclusive are a good option because they are affordable,” Newell says. Just as importantly, they are easy and stress free, which may appeal to travellers seeking respite from the daily grind of lunch packing and fights over putting down the iPad.
The honeyboomer travel trend can easily be compared to the “babymoon” a few years back, which went from an all but unheard of practice to a mainstay of pending parenthood in certain circles. Newell says she books 10 times as many babymoons now as she did 10 years ago.
It proves the power of a catchy buzz term, both in boosting sales and combating stigma, she says.
“I think there used to be this idea of, oh, I shouldn’t travel because I’m pregnant, and now, that thinking has totally changed.”
Similarly #honeyboom, could be just the thing to dissuade parents from feeling guilty about travelling as a twosome.
Whitney McGregor and her husband Brock of Chatham, Ont., have 11-year-old twin sons and a 2-year-old daughter.
“We try to take a couple’s vacation whenever we can,” Whitney says. With two careers and a house full of kids, opportunities for adult conversation don’t always come up, she adds.
MacGregor admits she felt “pangs of guilt” on a recent trip when she saw kids about the same age as her twins, but pushed past it. “As my mom always says, the kids will survive, but will your relationship if you don’t make it a priority?”
In his recent book The All-or-Nothing Marriage, psychologist Eli Finkle says to keep the spark alive, couples need to spend time together in a way that breaks from the routine. Not just any old date night will do. A child-free holiday can do just that.
“Of course we enjoy the break,” Lisa Pratt says, “but it’s also about setting an example for our children. I want them to see that they have parents who enjoy spending time with each other. I want them to know what a happy relationship looks like.”