By Ben Groundwater
Sydney's The Old Clare Hotel, Chippendale. Credit: Fairfax
Staycation: it doesn't sound great, does it? It's one of those buzzwords designed to make something mundane sound exciting. Like "human resources".
A staycation, surely, is just staying where you are, which seems much more like the first half of the portmanteau than the second. It's not travel at all. I get that we had to do staycations during the worst of the pandemic, during lockdowns and lock-ins. Making the concept sound exciting helped take some of the awfulness out of the whole situation. But now?
Now, it doesn't sound like something you want to be doing and calling it travel.
Ovolo Laneways in Melbourne.
And yet, we're also at a point where a lot of people will be considering a "staycation" this summer, despite our relative freedom. That thanks to all sorts of factors: worries over COVID-19; the well-publicised difficulties of air travel at the moment; and the sky-rocketing cost of living in Australia.
You may not like the idea of a staycation, but having a holiday close to home – maybe even in your actual home city – could be the only option for some people this year. And fair enough.
So, I've been thinking about how to do this right, how to have maximum enjoyment with minimum movement. If you're thinking of having a holiday at home this year, staying in accommodation in your own city or its immediate surrounds, this is how I think you should tackle it.
Bring your friends along.Credit: iStock
My first and best piece of advice relates to hotels, and it is: go hard, or stay home. A staycation is not the time to half-arse it on the accommodation. If you're going to be a tourist in your own city and spend a few nights in a hotel in town, then it has to be a good hotel. A really good hotel.
It has to be better than your home, essentially. It has to offer things that your home can't. It has to make you forget all about your home.
If it doesn't, you will find yourself crammed into a small, drab box of a room trying to figure out how to get the air-conditioning to work properly and worrying about all the noise from the street and griping about how it's impossible to work the shower knobs and wondering if you might just be better off driving half an hour to get back home.
After all, there's a great mini-bar at home. And it's already paid for.
Staying in a hotel is not innately exciting – it has to be a good hotel. So, spend up big on accommodation if you're staying in your own city, more than you usually would overseas. Otherwise it's going to feel weird. And disappointing.
You may be thinking, what's the point of holidaying at home if you're just going to spend more money than usual? But think of all the money you're not spending on this trip: flights, insurance, much longer periods away from home. You're coming out way ahead.
If that still sounds like a waste, however, then my next piece of advice is to make sure you're going somewhere on this staycation that's at least an hour's drive from your house. That way if the accommodation isn't amazing and your home would be more comfortable, you're at least too far away from that home to wonder why you didn't just go back there. Plus, you're in a different town, and that's a travel experience.
You don't have to go far: just an hour away from your house. Go camping by a beach or in a national park. Stay in a cabin in a campsite. Rent a holiday home if you can afford it. The idea here is just to take yourself to a different location that offers something your home doesn't. And just like that, you're travelling.
Next piece of advice: bring your friends. This is your chance to travel with people you may not normally get to hang out with on holidays. It's not easy to organise a bunch of people to fly to Japan for two weeks; it's a whole lot easier to get them to go camping down the coast for a few days.
So for this year's staycation, rope in as many people as possible. Share the love. Share the experience. What you lose in, say, cultural immersion, you gain in the joy of spending time with people you love.
On that idea of cultural immersion though – this is something you can actually do on a staycation, and something you should definitely look into. This is a great opportunity to learn more about the Indigenous heritage and cultural traditions of your home. Wherever you happen to be in Australia, hook up with a local Indigenous guide, or tour company, and see your home from a different perspective.
It's worth building at least a few days like this into your plans, in fact. Go to events. Go on tours. Being at home can make you a little lazy, like you could do all this stuff any time, so why now? But… why not now?
Approach a holiday at home in the same way you would a holiday overseas, with a similar split of spare time and planned activities. Do as a tourist would – do the same activities, go to the same events.
Staying close to home for your holidays this year might not sound great. But you can have a huge amount of fun with it.
Email: b.groundwater@traveller.com.au
Instagram: instagram.com/bengroundwater
Twitter: twitter.com/bengroundwater
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