A staycation (a portmanteau of "stay" and "vacation"), or holistay (a portmanteau of "holiday" and "stay"), is a period in which an individual or family stays home and participates in leisure activities within day trip distance of their home and does not require overnight accommodation. [2] In British English, the term has increasingly come to refer to domestic tourism: taking a holiday in one's own country as opposed to traveling abroad. [3] [4] [5] [6]
Common activities of a staycation include the use of a backyard pool, visits to local parks and museums, and attendance at local festivals and amusement parks. Some staycationers also like to follow a set of rules, such as setting a start and end date, planning ahead, and avoiding routine, with the goal of creating the feel of a traditional vacation. [7]
Staycations achieved popularity in the U.S. during the financial crisis of 2007–2010. [8] [9] In 2020 staycations became common due to the COVID-19 pandemic. [10]
The word staycation is a portmanteau of stay (meaning stay-at-home) and vacation. [11] [12] The term daycation are also sometimes used. [9] The earliest references to this term as coming from a 2003 article by Terry Massey in The Sun News. [11]
Hotel impresario Paul Ruffino has been credited for his incarnation of the word. [13] But, according to a Connecticut travel blog, the word "staycation" was originally coined by Canadian comedian Brent Butt in the television show Corner Gas , in the episode "Mail Fraud", which first aired 24 October 2005. The word became widely used in the United States during May 2008 as the summer travel season began mid-2008 when gas prices reaching record highs, leading many people to cut back on expenses including travel. [14] [15] Merriam-Webster cites the earliest use in the Cincinnati Enquirer 18 July 1944. [16] The term was added to the 2009 version of the Merriam–Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. [17]
A closely related concept and term is nearcation, which is taking a vacation to a location relatively close to home. [18] [19] Lake Superior State University added the word to its 2009 List of Banished Words. The citation noted that vacation is not synonymous with travel, and thus a separate term isn't necessary to describe a vacation during which one stays at home. [20]
Staycations are likely to be less costly than a vacation involving traveling. There may be no lodging costs and travel expenses may be minimal. Costs may include transportation for local trips, dining, and local attractions. [21] According to the American Automobile Association, "the average North American vacation will cost $244 per day for two people for lodging and meals" and "Add some kids and airfare, and a 10-day vacation could top $8,000." [21]
Staycations are likely to avoid some of the stress associated with travel, such as jet lag, packing, long drives, or waits at airports. [22]
Staycations may be of economic benefit to some local businesses, who get customers from the area providing them with business. In 2008, the tourism bureaus of many U.S. cities also began promoting staycations for their residents to help replace the tourism dollars lost from a drop in out-of-town visitors. [7]
Staycationers may spend money they had not planned as retailers and other advertisers offer "deals" to encourage staycationers to spend money. [23] Staycationers can also finish a stay-at-home vacation feeling unsatisfied if they allow themselves to fall into their daily monotony and include household projects, errands, and other tasks in their vacation at home or near home. [7]
A honeymoon is a holiday taken by newlyweds after their wedding to celebrate their marriage. Today, honeymoons are often celebrated in destinations considered exotic or romantic. In a similar context, it may also refer to the phase in a couple's relationship—whether they are in matrimony or not—that exists before getting used to everyday life together.
Tourism is travel for pleasure, and the commercial activity of providing and supporting such travel. The World Tourism Organization defines tourism more generally, in terms which go "beyond the common perception of tourism as being limited to holiday activity only", as people "travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure and not less than 24 hours, business and other purposes". Tourism can be domestic or international, and international tourism has both incoming and outgoing implications on a country's balance of payments.
Travel is the movement of people between distant geographical locations. Travel can be done by foot, bicycle, automobile, train, boat, bus, airplane, ship or other means, with or without luggage, and can be one way or round trip. Travel can also include relatively short stays between successive movements, as in the case of tourism.
A buzzword is a word or phrase, new or already existing, that becomes popular for a period of time. Buzzwords often derive from technical terms yet often have much of the original technical meaning removed through fashionable use, being simply used to impress others. Some buzzwords retain their true technical meaning when used in the correct contexts, for example artificial intelligence. Buzzwords often originate in jargon, acronyms, or neologisms. Examples of overworked business buzzwords include synergy, vertical, dynamic, cyber and strategy.
Lodging refers to the use of a short-term dwelling, usually by renting the living space or sometimes through some other arrangement. People who travel and stay away from home for more than a day need lodging for sleep, rest, food, safety, shelter from cold temperatures or rain, storage of luggage and access to common household functions. Lodging is a form of the sharing economy.
A gimmick is a novel device or idea designed primarily to attract attention or increase appeal, often with little intrinsic value. When applied to retail marketing, it is a unique or quirky feature designed to make a product or service "stand out" from its competitors. Product gimmicks are sometimes considered mere novelties, and tangential to the product's functioning. Gimmicks are occasionally viewed negatively, but some seemingly trivial gimmicks of the past have evolved into useful, permanent features. In video games, the term is also sometimes used to describe unusual features or playstyles, especially if they are unnecessary or obnoxious.
"McJob" is a slang term for a low-paying, low-prestige dead-end job that requires few skills and offers very little chance of advancement. The term "McJob" comes from the name of the fast-food restaurant McDonald's, but is used to describe any low-status job – regardless of employer – where little training is required, staff turnover is high, and workers' activities are tightly regulated by managers.
A vacation or holiday is either a leave of absence from a regular job or an instance of leisure travel away from home. People often take a vacation during specific holiday observances or for specific festivals or celebrations. Vacations are often spent with friends or family. Vacations may include a specific trip or journey, usually for the purpose of recreation or tourism.
Backpacking is a form of low-cost, independent travel, which often includes staying in inexpensive lodgings and carrying all necessary possessions in a backpack. Once seen as a marginal form of travel undertaken only through necessity, it has become a mainstream form of tourism.
A day trip is a visit to a tourist destination or visitor attraction from a person's home, hotel, or hostel in the morning, returning to the same lodging in the evening. The day trip is a form of recreational travel and leisure to a location that is close enough to make a round-trip within a day but does not require an overnight stay. The logistics and/or costs of spending nights on the road are worth avoiding. Such travel of using one location as a homebase is popular with budget and active travelers to avoid finding new lodging at each destination. A caregiver may take a day trip from their home to return to their children or pets.
A gourmand is a person who takes great pleasure and interest in consuming particularly good food and drink. Gourmand originally referred to a person who was "a glutton for food and drink", a person who eats and drinks excessively.
A vacation rental is the renting out of a furnished apartment, house, or professionally managed resort-condominium complex on a temporary basis to tourists as an alternative to a hotel. The term vacation rental is mainly used in the US. Other terms used are self-catering rental, holiday home, holiday let, cottage holiday and gite.
Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.
In the lineal kinship system used in the English-speaking world, a niece or nephew is a child of an individual's sibling or sibling-in-law. A niece is female and a nephew is male, and they would call their parents' siblings aunt or uncle. The gender-neutral term nibling has been used in place of the common terms, especially in specialist literature.
Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year are words of the year lists published annually by the American dictionary-publishing company Merriam-Webster, Inc. The lists feature ten words from the English language. These word lists started in 2003 and have been published at the end of each year.
HomeAway was a vacation rental marketplace. It operated through 50 websites in 23 languages through which it offered rentals of cabins, condos, castles, villas, barns, and farmhouses.
Domestic tourism is tourism involving residents of one country traveling only within that country. Such a vacation is known as a domestic vacation. For large countries with limited skill in foreign languages, for example Russia, Brazil, Canada, Australia, United States, China and India, domestic tourism plays a very large role in the total tourism sector.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to tourism:
International tourism is tourism that crosses national borders. Globalisation has made tourism a popular global leisure activity. The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as people "traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes". The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that up to 500,000 people are in flight at any one time.
In linguistics, a libfix is a productive bound morpheme affix created by rebracketing and back-formation, often a generalization of a component of a blended or portmanteau word. For example, walkathon was coined in 1932 as a blend of walk and marathon, and soon thereafter the -athon part was reinterpreted as a libfix morpheme meaning "event or activity lasting a long time or involving a great deal of something". Words formed with this suffix include talkathon, telethon, hackathon, and so on. Affixes whose morpheme boundaries are etymologically based, and which are used in their original sense, are not libfixes. Libfixes often utilise interthesis, as in the example of -holism and -holic which are joined with consonant-final segments via the vowel /a/, creating work-a-holism or sex-a-holism.