Lonely Planet, the BBC owned magazine and tourist guidebook publisher, has surveyed its readers and announced their first ever awards. The idea behind these new awards is to discover what the top experiences of its readers were. But Lonely Planet widened the questions so that its readers were able to offer wider opinions outside the normal sort of awards.
For example, voters said that cheaper train travel and better value accommodation would improve their holidays and Lonely Planet interprets this to mean that the economic conditions were behind people’s thinking in answering.
The most underrated day out was thought to be walking on Scottish beaches rather than visiting cities or walking along the ancient coastline of Dorset. And that tells you something about the position of the voters. These are a group of specialised people rather than the average holiday or day tripper. The place they wouldn’t go to even if they were paid would be Benidorm yet it’s still a top destination for Britons. They prefer adventurous rather than easy holidays, intriguing rather than safe ones and the unusual rather than the familiar.
Nonetheless, having written that, there are some fun things to come out of the results. The place that most people would like to move to is New Zealand; if they won the lottery they would sail round the world in their own yacht. No cruise ships for them. The greatest heritage trip they could make wouldn’t be to the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids in Egypt but to Tikal in Guatemala to see the Mayan temples.
These people might not fancy Benidorm but beaches still appeal since they voted listening to reggae on the beach at Negril in Jamaica as their most desirable cultural experience.
For the rest of us who aren’t adventurous or fancy the unusual or the intriguing, this vote tells us nothing other than what we already know; – holidaymakers have almost as many different ideas as there are individuals.