So, that holiday you’ve been fantasising about for a millennium, as you struggle through yet another meeting with BO-stinking Arnold from IT, has finally come around and you couldn’t be more excited.
You and your best friend have micro-managed your packing, squishing everything you could need for the week into hand luggage, meaning that you can get straight off the plane and into making the most of everything your holiday has to offer.
We’re obviously not talking mountaineering or anything, but you certainly want to check out as many bars and restaurants as is humanly possible and maybe even visit a gallery or two if you’re not too drunk on carbohydrates and cheap plonk by mid-afternoon. But when you get there, you realise your mate has another idea – mainly sunbathing like a rotisserie chicken, sweaty and totally soundless, for every goddamn minute of sunlight.
Your idea of a holiday is doing something, in a new and varied location – and she agrees. Although, by something she means topping up her tan and sleeping. The lazy bitch.
Any of this sound familiar? If so, then you're not alone, as a new survey has found that British travellers are amongst the laziest on the planet. The Flip Flop Report– an annual survey that looks at the travel habits of four continents compiled by travel booking company Expedia – showed that we’re the third most inactive country, with only Japan and Thailand coming in below us.
Apparently 92% of us will pick a quiet destination when we go away and we’ll crave an easy life with only a (frankly pitiful) 13% of us saying we’d feel excited about the prospect of partying while on our summer trip. Whatever happened to the cliche of boozed-up Brits abroad? This is contrast to Brazilians, 87% of whom say they’d expect big nights out during their break. Bizarrely, less than one in five of the Brits polled said they could be bothered to even go swimming whilst away.
Now, we get that we’re all very busy and everything and people want to unwind, but when your lethargy gets to the stage that you can’t even be bothered to drag your sorry, sweaty sunburnt arse into the sea, then maybe you need more than a holiday.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophiecullinane
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.