I read so many posts on FT about folks doing leisure trips to far-off places for just a few days. (for example, there's currently this BA thread:
What's the furthest you've flown for the shortest amount of time on leisure?) Not talking about MR.
I want to get some perspectives as to how folks justify spending so much and traveling so far only for a couple days at the destination. Our family is reaching the point where we may need to start doing the same. Like a 5-day trip to Jpn from NAmerica. But then I'm having difficult time justifying it in my mind.
All of my leisure travels are with wife and 2 kids. We've been traveling to Asia 3-4x a year, and trips have usually ranged from 1 week to 3 weeks. On top of that, we do a bit of US domestic travels. But what really floats our boat is traveling to Asia. I don't rack up tons of miles like a lot of you (maybe ~150k miles per year, mostly from credit card), so I pay for most of our travels, miles are as precious as $ to me, and we have to travel almost exclusively in Y.
Taking a certain Jpn destination as an example, this is the way I look at it:
-- 5-day trip: total of 35-40hrs door-to-door roundtrip travel time with
65hr at the destination, meaning
35% of vacation is spent traveling, while spending $3000~$4500 for family of four.
-- 10-day trip: same travel time as above with
115hr at the destination, meaning
25% of vacation is spent traveling, while spending same airfare as above plus additional ~$2000 for misc costs of vacationing 5 extra days.
Before I got married with kids, I myself used to travel to Jpn/HKG on ultra-short trips. But with 3 dependents, airfare is a lot more and so a big part of it is that I feel like we need to get more out of a trip if we're spending lots of $. With our changing family/job situations, our choices are either take less trips or resign ourselves to shortening at least a couple of our Asia trips each year. But traveling is what keeps us going.
To those who go to far-off places for a short leisure trips, can you provide some thoughts/perspectives that might help me rethink things and feel better about doing the same?