Bad Vacations: Three Factors that Can Negatively Influence Your Experience (and How to Avoid Them)

I’ve enjoyed looking at this photo I took from the top of a tower in La Rochelle, France, because the weather was so cold and windy I couldn’t enjoy the view while standing there. July 5, 2021.

I write often about my experiences and impressions of the places I’ve traveled and the things I experienced while there.

Each time I return from travel and think through my impressions and the angles and subjects for my articles based on the trip, I find it a delicate task.

In assessing a place or an experience, I try to parse out the aspects of an experience that may have unfairly influenced my impressions, including weather, mood, or my exact place of stay. If someone else visited the region and had different variables in these key categories, would they have a different impression?

After all, these three factors can unfairly bias anyone’s impressions and experiences of a vacation or travel moment.

We can’t control for these variables in all cases, yet we can take them into some level of account when planning. Read on for more detail on how each of these factors can affect your experience and my recommendations for how you can plan around them as much as possible.

Think through the Weather Factor

Note: You’ll note a cold-and-damp theme here. Because I don’t like cold and damp.

When we visited La Rochelle, France, one mid-July, the normally warm and sunny coastal town where people reportedly rent bikes to ride between islands and beaches was windy enough to dry out my contacts, gray enough to make anyone depressed, and miserably cold.

We had a good meal along one harbor or another, yet I can’t remember the name or location of the restaurant because I was focused on staying warm and dry. I’ve enjoyed looking at the photos and the videos I took on our visit, only because I can’t feel the cold and wind in the photos and the place looks better than I remember it feeling. (I didn’t even want to leave the hotel while there, I found it so miserable.)

A harbor in La Rochelle, France. Don’t see any people? Look kind of depressing? No wonder. For our entire visit the weather stayed cold, rainy, and windy. July 5, 2021.

Perhaps I should give La Rochelle another visit sometime, but I won’t put it at the top of my list for upcoming vacations. Visiting a place twice rarely makes sense, with so many places to go in this amazing world of ours.

However, Lyon in France is a large city relatively near to our home base in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Arnaud has a close family friend who lives there. We’ve visited Lyon twice (so far).

Of note regarding the weather-factor effect: While I enjoyed our trip to Lyon for my birthday, during which we took several walking tours, December comes in cold and damp in Lyon. I appreciated the city, yet I didn’t really enjoy it until we went back eighteen months later, in summer. (Even in a July rainstorm, I found the city positively charming on that go-around—an entirely different sentiment than plain appreciation.)

Another example? Let’s discuss Ghent, in Belgium. Even in the chill of early February (and while suffering from a head cold), I adored Ghent. However, you’ll find it nearly impossible to make unhappy someone who loves medieval and early Renaissance European history in one of the most important European cities during that time. (A once-in-a-lifetime Jan Van Eyck exhibit taking place during the trip didn’t hurt, either.)

Yet Arnaud didn’t love Ghent as much as I did, even if he appreciated the art exhibit more than he’d expected. He has since several times said he won’t go back to Belgium without warmer clothes.

Recommendations: Do your best to travel to places when you’ll have a likelihood of ideal weather, based on researching normal weather patterns in the region. And always have a few ideas in mind for things to do and to see when the weather doesn’t cooperate with your mental picture—as you can’t always avoid experiencing a weird cold front in July in a summer-vacation hotspot (as we had in La Rochelle).

Carefully Consider Your Location or Base of Stay in the Region

Everyone I talk to loves the Luberon region of Provence in France. Famous writers and authors have even penned entire series of books about living there. (I’m looking at you, Peter Mayle.)

However, the Luberon didn’t charm me.

Blame our choice of Menerbes as a base of stay. The tiny town went to sleep a long time ago and had little to offer. Or toss the fault to the AirBNB we chose, which had nothing comfortable on which to sit or rest, even to sleep: The apartment had only hard surfaces, including the mattress, and little by way of comfortable outdoor furniture to lounge or eat (and no view via which to admire the Provence countryside).

Given that the attraction of the area is, well, the landscape and enjoying it, our choice of AirBNB killed my Luberon experience.

The view from the dirt outside the place we stayed in Menerbes, in the Luberon, France. A nice landscape, but we would have had to sit in the dirt to look at it. August 25, 2019.

In Florence, Italy, we stayed in an AirBNB on a very busy street with reverberating scooters zipping by all night that was far enough away from anything of value (i.e., restaurants, bakeries, groceries) or of interest (i.e., all the major things to see) that we didn’t get a single good night of sleep and couldn’t go back to the apartment easily during the day without chopping a chunk out of our limited time in the city—not to mention the hike we needed to take anytime we wanted food or supplies for the place.

Final example: We would have liked our visit to the Bordeaux region of France a lot more if we hadn’t stayed in the city of Bordeaux. The city has a lot less charm and attraction than the smaller towns in the wine-growing countryside, which would have made for a more charming and relaxed vacation.

Recommendations: Yes, a hotel or a rental apartment with a high level of comfort or in a well-placed area will cost you more. However, paying more (if you can afford it) will give you an immeasurably better experience. As most of us only visit places once, it makes sense to set up everything for success as best we can. When it comes to cities and tourist areas, look for central locations near major areas of interest and with easy access to necessities such as cafés, groceries, and pharmacies. If you want to relax in the countryside, the place where you choose to stay needs a comfy setup. For, you know, relaxing. Keep in mind what you plan to do on your trip and find a place to stay that accommodates your ideas and that has the conveniences and amenities you need to make the trip successful.

Changing Your Location Doesn’t Change Your Emotional State (Usually)

A while back, the U.S. sketch show “Saturday Night Live” featured a fantastic—and fantastically on point—skit with Adam Sandler as a tour operator for Italian vacations. If you haven’t seen it, you should:

It’s true: Just being somewhere else won’t suddenly change the fundamental “you” of you and can’t miraculously erase whatever you’re going through psychologically or emotionally at that moment.

For my planned solo trip to Belize, a friend suffering a major heartbreak and needing a change of scenery asked to join me at the last minute. During the go-go-go adventure portion of the trip in the jungle, she held together okay. However, when we transitioned to the laze-on-the-beach portion of the trip, she was an emotional wreck and couldn’t enjoy the experience (and made it less than ideal for me, too).

Similarly, I’ve had two occasions—one with a friend and another with a romantic partner—where conflicts in our relationship deeply affected the vacation.

My memories of Glacier National Park will forever be colored by a shouting match on one hiking trail followed a few days later by my telling my friend over a plate of sweet-potato fries that I’d leave on the next flight if she kept up her behavior. As for the romantic trip that didn’t turn out to be romantic, that’s another story.

In short, while you will still be the same you while on vacation, your relationship (friendship or otherwise) will still be your relationship while on vacation, too.

Recommendations: You’ll do better to sort your emotional and psychological baggage before you spend time and money on travel. However, based on my experience with my heartbroken friend, if you feel you must get away from home amidst major emotional upheaval, plan to stay as active as possible; the initial stages of grief, trauma, or stress may not be the time to sit alone with your thoughts on the beach for too long, for example.

Take Time for Travel Contemplation

We easily make snap judgements about everything we encounter (including people). Though theories indicate that quick assessments can help us survive in the wild and can help reduce the cognitive load of constant contemplation, giving us more thinking space for higher level processes, deciding whether we liked a travel experience doesn’t count as an extreme circumstance that requires rapid appraisal.

When it comes to reviewing most travel experiences, you have time for contemplation.

And so, before you decide whether to put a destination in the “good” or “bad” bucket—and especially before you recommend it to others or tell them to stay away—try your best to parse out the extenuating circumstances to develop the clearest eyed view possible.

And if you can avoid or change these three factors that can highly influence your own travel experience, do so.

In hindsight, do you have a spot you’d like to revisit in a different season, different mood, or different base of stay?