Germans on holiday: more stress, less rest
A survey of holiday hassle is probably as true for us as it is for them.
It probably won’t have escaped your notice that Brits and Germans tend to go to the same places on holiday. Go to a beach in Mallorca, and there’ll be Germans around the corner. Up a mountain in Nepal – Germans. On a train in Latin America – more Germans. They seem to travel with great ease. With more ease, it seems, than us, with our inability to speak languages and our insistence on having milk in our tea.
There are certainly a lot of them out there; a massive 70 million travelled nationally and internationally in 2013. But a recent survey has found that all is not what it seems. Apparently, some 60 percent of travelling Teutons are annoyed by their travel partner, and hotel food drives 35 percent of them up the wall, whilst 21 percent are aggravated by the noise caused by children in resort hotels. In total, some 54 million German holidaymakers are on edge during their holidays. It doesn’t sound very relaxing at all.
“During their everyday working life, partners hardly see or talk to each other,” explains Hamburg-based psychologist Bernd Keilmann. “During their holidays, they hang around together for days and don’t have much to talk about. And their free time interests also turn out to be very different.”
According to the survey, which was carried out by Keyfacts Onlineforschung GmbH, the old cliché about the race for the sun loungers actually rates very low in aggravation factor for German tourists. Only nine percent find that annoying, and only five percent get irate about defects in the hotel or its surroundings.
And given that Germans and Brits seem to like the same places, I suspect that our holiday dislikes are the same, too. So that 60 percent annoyed by their travel partner, and that 35 percent disgusted by the hotel food – that could equally well be me, or you.
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