Wake up! Sleep tourism is a waste of a holiday

New research suggests more and more people are looking for restful getaways, but where's the fun in that?

The National’s Dean Wilkins during a hiking tour of Franschhoek, South Africa. Dean Wilkins / The National

I’m in a WhatsApp group called Gully’s Travels and it’s used to tease a friend. It’s not short for Gulliver but does nod to Jonathan Swift’s 300-year-old satirical classic. Instead, it’s short for Gullible and represents his holiday style of “I’ll pay literally anything as long as it’s a travel fad”.

Gluten-free beach weekenders. Done. Reiki mountain retreat for singletons. Done. Catch, kill and cook your steak. Well done.

He spends as much time searching for pointless holidays as he does taking them. And the more lazy, expensive and wasteful the better. This week, our group pinged with an image of his latest adventure. A giant bed in a windowless room that supposedly offers guests one of the quietest night’s sleeps on Earth – until they wake up to a $525 bill and realise it was all just an overpriced nightmare.

“Oh, little bit of me time. Can't wait, needed this,” he wrote after a 14-hour door-to-door journey. Instead of spending that time falling into the ghastly trap of sleep tourism, he should've had the mother of all naps on the sofa watching reruns of Friends on Neftlix instead, like he does every weekend anyway.

However, he’s not alone. His style of travel combines some of next year’s biggest trends, according to research by Hilton. While it recently found 70 per cent of people want to be active when they travel, 20 per cent want to go “hurkle-durkling” instead – a Scottish phrase that means lounging in bed all day that recently did the rounds on TikTok, apparently. I know this because I googled it.

And, according to the survey of 13,000 people in 13 countries, a further 25 per cent will book a spa or wellness treatment to enhance sleep. Here’s another way of putting it: 20 per cent of people should just stay in bed at home and the other 25 per cent should save their money … by staying in bed.

Holidays are a privilege and I’ve always been firmly with the 70 per cent who want to do something worthwhile on them. But I need proper active, not a couple of tours thinly spread over a leisurely fortnight. I squeeze in as much as I can whether that’s cities, sights or food.

Sicily? Completed it in three days. Mekong River? Sailed it in four. Whether hiking in Jordan or South Africa, sailing around the Phillippines or zipping through Thailand on trains, I try to cross a country as quickly as the UK churns through prime ministers. It proved tricky in Laos and Cuba, where they barely have any tarmac that isn't pockmarked with sinkholes.

For me, impatience is a virtue. And when I’m on holiday, if there is one word that is laced with the ick factor it is “relax”. Hideous. I can’t abide the thought of it. It’s not a sensible use of time.

Imagine if history's greatest explorers were sucked into a sleep tourism vortex instead of setting off where no one else had been before. All their diaries would just read: “Was about to go discover, felt tired so sailed to a different port and dozed off instead. Lols.” Everest still wouldn't have been conquered, no one would know about America and we'd probably all still think the Earth was flat.

When it comes to seeing the world, sleep is the first thing to sacrifice. No one looks back on a holiday and says: “Ah yes, Australia 2017. Nothing like eight hours Down Under.” It takes about a year to get over the jet lag anyway so why not eat a ‘roo burger in Melbourne at 2am, climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge nine hours north at noon and go surfing on the Gold Coast by nightfall?

However, I will admit the hardcore cramming of exploration is a young person’s game. When I first started travelling alone or in groups of two or three, I was in my late teens. An average day would involve something like 18 hours of pinballing around a city’s landmarks, getting lost, getting cross, getting back on track across 35,000 steps fuelled by about a gazillion espressos and cheap hand-rolled cigarettes.

We’d snatch a couple of hours of sleep where we could on overnight buses, trains or airport floors (I once slept in London’s Trafalgar Square) and repeat it all the following day. Now I’ve stubbed out the smoking habit, barely drink coffee and get as far as the front door before my back pleads: “No more!” But the memories are there, and they weren’t made by lounging around all day.

While the study suggests most travellers want to join organised excursions, many of the best moments were ones I’d stumbled across either accidentally or by following another adventurer’s tip.

I found an old lady who made scarecrows and plunged them into the ground to frighten the local children in Latvia. I met a man with a tattoo of Manchester United’s badge in the middle of his forehead in Bulgaria – he had also changed his name to his beloved team. And, while dressed as a Jedi in the Sahara, I reenacted a Star Wars fight scene with a Tunisian shepherd in full Darth Vader regalia. Lightsabres included.

Best of all, they were all free. While they are not the sort of excursions pedalled out en masse by travel agents or the ones ramping up the envy factor on TikTok, nor are they the overpriced fads my friend will be needled for in Gully's Travels. They are exactly the sort of things you can’t do rotting in bed.