By Elliott Musser
Opinion Editor
The real cost of a vacation.
How often do you go on vacations? Probably not very often! The prices are too high, it’s too much of a bother to travel and you’d miss out at too much when your home. All of these made me wonder, is it even worth it to take a vacation?
For starters the cost. The average vacation cost (all types taken into account) is estimated to be $7,249 per the motley fool. The average length of a vacation in the United States is 4 days according to a study done by Mastercard. The final piece is the average hourly wage of somebody in the United States which is $36.54 over an average span of 8.4 hours a day. After a little bit of math, you can find that it takes the average American about 23 days of spending all your work money for one 4-day vacation. Why would you spend more time working for a vacation then actually vacationing yourself. If you saved that money you could have more things at home and not have to pay even more to go out.
Another cost of a vacation is the pure difficulty it takes to travel. If your flying the average time just to get on your plane is about 3 hours. This time is also taken into account in the average vacation time. Thinks like the drives and plane rides to your destination already eat up part of your vacation, doing something that most don’t enjoy when you could stay home and not experience the hassle.
Yet another problem with vacations is what you would miss out on. Taking a vacation means missing out on many things that you would get otherwise. Sometimes that might be pay (depending on whether you use vacation days) sometimes that means experiences like parties at home or events that you are supposed to attend. Every time your gone from your home you have to catch up on what’s happening locally, which can take lots of time.
In the end a vacation will always be something that is a part of American society, but it probably shouldn’t be so frequent. The negatives typically outweigh the benefits, and lots of vacations feature things that you could do the same thing at home without traveling.
