Travel

With family budgets as tight as they are right now, we’re in need of vacation time more than ever. Somewhat ironically, tight budgets means less time you can take off. But behavioral scientists interested in researching how to “optimize happiness” from a vacation say that taking shorter trips may be better than long ones.

As summarized at Bobulate, here are the things that matter most about vacation:

• How long we take off probably counts for less than we think
• Taking more short trips leaves us happier than taking a few long ones
• We’re often happier planning a trip than actually taking it
• Interrupting a vacation can make us enjoy it more
• How a trip ends matters more than how it begins

So instead of using up all your vacation days for long, extended family trips, maybe more frequent, shorter vacations are better a use of your paid days off.

What was the best vacation you’ve ever had? Was it short or long? What did you remember most?

From the Boston Globe. Photo by m o d e.

With families at their most budget-conscious this summer (we’re all saving up for iPads right?), parents are looking for any vacation deal they can get. And since leisure travel is rising in relation to dwindling business travel, hotels are looking to bait traveling families with a number of deals.

Hilton’s Hollywood Suites hotels are revamping their meal programs. Free dinner and drinks — including beer and wine — is available Monday through Thursday. Their breakfasts will also have more options, including breakfast sandwiches and omelets. Marriott is also stocking up on toddler care items, like fitted slip covers for cribs, bath toys, lotion, shampoo, and night lights to accommodate families with young children.

There are also the freebies. Marriott hotels, for example, will be giving away free activity books and Nickelodeon-branded bracelets. Omni Hotels have free goodie bags with Twizzlers, flashlights, bookmarks, and other knick knacks.
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It’s hard to part with our beloved pets, even for a weeklong vacation. So why not take your dog or cat with you? Sure, it might make the trip a little more complicated, but if you take a few of these extra precautions, courtesy of USA Today, you’ll be good to go:

Health

You should take your pet to the vet no less than two weeks before you leave for your vacation. Have the vet give a complete physical and give your pet up to date on vaccinations. Preventative treatment against fleas and ticks might be helpful too.
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A new comprehensive study published in the Journal of Applied Research in Quality of Life (that sounds like one very focused publication) reveals some sobering truths about the effects of vacation on one’s overall happiness.

The study says that vacation boosts happiness for eight weeks, but surprisingly, not the weeks after the trip. Even those who reported their vacation as “neutral” or “relaxing” didn’t see a jump in happiness, but instead, a return to baseline happiness. The truth is that we enjoy anticipating vacations rather than enjoying their lasting effects. There’s also no correlation between the length of the vacation and overall happiness. So maybe the best advice is to take a lot of short trips instead of one long vacation.

Speaking of vacations, have you entered our awesome Best Family Vacation Ever giveaway yet? All you have to do is leave a comment and you can win $250 to Amazon and a year-long membership to Life360 — a guaranteed boost to your happiness!

Read the full thing at Well Blog.

You often hear that “flying is the safest way to travel,” but how safe is that exactly? It turns out the global accident rate for Western-built jet aircraft is one accident for every 1.4 million flights. Wow, those are pretty good odds, even if you’re going for putting in Up in the Air-worthy miles.

Here’s another way to look at it: if you took one flight every day, you could go 3,859 years accident free. Now if I could go that long without a ridiculous flight delay or spending $10 on an airport sandwich…

More at CNN.

The New York Times compared four competing airfare “meta-search” engines, sites that crawl offerings from many airlines at once, so you don’t have to. Included were Kayak, Fly.com, Bing Travel, and Momondo, all which had similar but different results.

Kayak came up with pretty cheap results, and even included a nifty baggage calculator, which will definitely swing the cost of your travel depending on which airline you take. Bing Travel offered the same fare, minus baggage checker, but offered an interesting feature called the Price Predicator which algorithmically determines whether a fare is likely to go up or down in price over the next week.
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Film Director Kevin Smith, best known for comedies like Clerks and Chasing Amy, was kicked out of his seat on a Southwest Airlines flight for being a “safety risk.” This happened after Smith was seated, and the pilot determined that Smith was too large to be on the flight.

“I know I’m fat, but was (the pilot) really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?” he tweeted. “I broke no regulation, offered no ’safety risk’ (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?). I saw someone bigger than me on THAT flight! But I wasn’t about to throw a fellow Fatty under the plane as I’m being profiled. But he & I made eye contact, & he was like ‘Please don’t tell…’”

Smith called the incident embarrassing and vowed to continue tweeting about the airline for telling him he’s “too wide for the sky.”

A few lessons here. First, you can apparently be kicked off a plane for being too large. Second, you can apparently be kicked off a plane for being too large even if you’re a celebrity. Lastly, celebrities will now get back at you VIA TWITTER.

Full story at the LA Times. Photo by Eric E Johnson.

No one would say that commercial airline pilots aren’t working hard, but are they working too hard? A recent LA Times article questions if pilot fatigue has been a factor in four crashes.

Last year, pilots earned roughly $28,000, which the Times pointed is “less than a typical Los Angeles bus driver.” And for that salary, a pilot is looking at 12 to 13 hour workday, four days a week. Interestingly, it’s regional airlines that have more trouble.
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Did you see Up in the Air? In this Oscar shoe-in, George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man who spends most of the year on the road for work, accumulating frequent flier miles. His goal is to become a part of the most elite of elite in American Airlines’s frequent flier program, a feat that requires 10 million flown miles. But how much of Up in the Air is Hollywood fiction? Apparently not much of it.
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Thanks to Nigerian would-be terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to take down a flight to Detroit, we’ll be seeing heightened security measures at the airport. But how exactly will this affect you?

According to the Boston Globe, two things are being improved: the watch list of suspected terrorists and the preboarding scans that should detect the explosives hidden on any person.

Also, the Transportation Security Administration (your friends, the TSA) will be subjecting all passengers to an “extra pat-down body search” and will have manual searches of hand luggage before they board at the terminal gates.

The airport is never a fun experience, and it’s about to get even less fun. But I suppose every extra effort is worth the peace of mind. You can take comfort in the fact that the chance of being a terrorist victim during a flight is one in 10,408,947.

Photo by alist.