Instead of spending your free time planning your next holiday down to every minute, why don’t you try something new? Give yourself and your travel companions 30 minutes to pack a bag of the basics before you head out the door and on your way to the airport.
When you get to the airport, give the airport representative a budget for roundtrip tickets to anywhere and let them decide where you are spending your long weekend. Istanbul? Bali? London? Monaco? The next town over? No matter where they choose to send you, it will be an adventure, and you will get to take it in stride…you’re headed off on your first spontaneous holiday.
Sound stressful? For a lot of people, it does. But, studies have recently shown that spur-of-the-moment travel does the opposite for people—it actually de-stresses them. According to research conducted by the University of Alabama by taking shorter, spontaneous trips without the methodical planning that usually accompanies taking a holiday, you will actually experience less stress and worry than you would on a longer, planned out holiday. There are other benefits to spur-of-the-moment travelling as well:
Relax as much as you want
Much like solo travel, when you choose to travel at the last minute you get the peace of mind that you aren’t breaking any plans and aren’t messing up any schedules. If you want to visit one place and call it done, you can. Or if you want to see every historical place in the whole of your city, you can do that too and no one will know or be upset about plans being rearranged, cancelled or added to the itinerary. The ability to change what you want to do on a whim is contagious, and one of the major benefits of travelling freely.
Cultivate mindfulness and live in the moment
Nothing frees up your mind more than getting out of the office and into a new city. Why busy your mind with expense reports or that project you have to finish in a month when you could think about how a city came to be and the history of the people that have lived there instead? How can you fuss about hotel reservations and missing a tourist spot when you are walking through some of the most historical places in the world and making up your schedule as you go?
It’s hard to take a spontaneous trip to somewhere amazing and find the time or desire to worry and fret about the little things. Whenever you realize that everything will work out on its own and that you will have a bed to sleep in tonight, even if you don’t know where it is yet, you’ll be able to let go and enjoy the impulsive nature of last-minute trips. Unscheduled holidays allow you to focus on the big picture instead of the small details.
Find the best travel deals around
There are a lot of benefits to taking an impulsive holiday, paramount among them being the cheap travel rates you are sure to snag. There are last-minute deal sites all over the internet and if you are willing to be flexible about your travel dates and wait until the last minute to buy them, you can be rewarded with staggeringly low prices to some of the most sought-after destinations.
No matter where you end up for your next spontaneous holiday, make sure your trip will be covered by purchasing online travel insurance from Cover-More New Zealand.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Learning Lark