Why millennials should stop spending all their money on city breaks and stay in the UK

Weekend city breaks are over. And if they aren’t, they should be – or at the very least, reserved for special occasions of enforced fun (like stags and hens). There’s nothing more stressful than a city break. Except perhaps planning one.

You make a whopping great list of everything to tick off – a miniature bucket list of destinations, eateries and bars – then cram them into the space of less than 36 hours. Add in the stresses of the airport and there’s only one thing you feel at the end as you finally collapse onto your sofa so drained of energy that even tugging the luggage tag off your suitcase is strenuous. Fulfilled? No. Relaxed? Definitely not. Under budget? Never. Exhausted? Certainly.

You may roll into work on a Monday with a beautiful Instagram feed, but that’s likely to go hand-in-hand with a slightly shorter life expectancy than the one you left with.

Luckily, with Britain as our backyard, there’s plenty to see without even having to set foot in the clinical, anxiety-inducing, personality-changing vortex that is also known as the airport.

Beautiful and diverse, you can spend every weekend of the year away and barely scratch the surface. You’ll never be rushed. Or feel like your weekend has been wasted. After all, this isn’t a once-in-a-lifetime trip. You can always come back. Or if you hate it, you can always go home. And if it rains? Unlike travelling abroad – where you blithely believe it never rains – you can’t reasonably pretend that you weren’t expecting it.

So upon recently deciding where to spend a rare long weekend with my two younger sisters, we opted for St Mawes in Cornwall. In part because I wanted to test my hypothesis that millennials willing to ditch the city break in favour of one in the UK might just have an infinitely more relaxing time.   

These days, admitting you’re a millennial feels a little like you’ve just screamed that you’re an alcoholic in a room full of Seventh-day Adventists. But my sisters and I all fall into that generation – and our opinions on what makes a good holiday differ as strongly as our feelings on avocados.

I like to be outdoors – hiking, wildlife spotting, trying out new activities and taking an obscene number of pictures. The eldest of my two sisters is what I would call a ‘relaxer’. Her ideal trip involves a stack of books, delicious food and sunshine: the cold is to be avoided at all costs and the more time scheduled for naps, the better. The youngest is a procrastinator and a creature of convenience. A fan of organised tours, she likes exploring, but is happier doing it when someone else tells her where to be and when.  

So throw these all together and what do you get? A potential family feud. The last time we attempted to holiday together alone, we ended up in a Greek hospital for the best part of a week, returning to the UK with one of them short an appendix and mildly afraid she would explode on the plane.

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I’d convinced them we were safe staying within the parameters of England – not only was the NHS conveniently on hand but I’d sold them on an experience that was completely different to a city break on the continent.

No hotel with overbearing service staff, no sales rep instilling you with FOMO (fear of missing out) about an event that you’d never even heard of until ten minutes earlier, and no inner conflict when you feel you should be discovering the ‘off-the-beaten-track’ places, but really, deep down, just want to go and stare at the biggest, brashest attraction in town for a good hour or so.

Instead, we converged on Oxford, bundled into a car, hurtled down the country on a late Friday evening and holed up in a peaceful cottage stacked up a quiet street in St Mawes with tip-toe views of the sea.  

We’d booked Bass Cottage through a cottage company with a concierge service – they’ll do pretty much everything for you – perfect for anyone who’s a bit time poor (so the entire population of the British Isles).

Tell them roughly where and when you want to go and they’ll do the digging for you. Once you’ve narrowed down your cottage, they’ll offer a range of activities, make restaurant reservations based on recommendations from people that really know the area and even stock your fridge with breakfast. It’s a breeze.

The weekend was spent juggling activities to appease everyone, using our cottage as a base. We walked, explored, took a very (very) long lunch on the sunny terrace of the Idle Rocks restaurant and enjoyed the kind of rare spring weather that in Cornwall can trick you into thinking you’re in the Med.

I also signed them up for a private surf lesson in Polzeath, north Cornwall, with George from George's Surf School. This is where I expected the whole thing to fall down. The sea was beyond cold and the relaxer had posed the very real threat of not participating.

But my spirits rose as she begrudgingly began to pull on the wetsuit, sunk her feet into the cold, wet boots with a decided squelch and a look that read: “I am not amused”, picked up a surfboard and headed down to the shore.

We were halfway there. If George, could get her warm enough and interested enough to throw herself into the waves (which might be maybe the third time I’d seen her in English waters in the last ten or so years), it would be a miracle.

So when the three of us emerged two hours later with grins plastered across our faces, feeling elated at having been able to stand at least a handful of times for a couple of minutes, I was dumbfounded.

We’d learnt something new, had time to unwind, experienced a part of the world we’d never seen before, explored some of our nation’s history, consumed plenty of delicious locally-sourced food accompanied by a glass of wine or three and spent some quality time together. It was the perfect holiday. And we’d achieved it without entering a single queue.

We didn’t have to check in or out of anywhere, show identification to anyone and there was no pressure to have a good time. Perhaps best of all, we all went home felt refreshed, relaxed and wondering why so many of our peers had run off overseas or stayed at home because they thought that they didn’t have time to plan anything.

It was unanimous – we all felt more relaxed after a long weekend away in the UK than we’d ever felt after a city break. In fact, we felt better than we had after a number of week-long luxury resort breaks in a variety of sun-drenched destinations.  

The conclusion? Millennials need to ditch the weekend city break and stay closer to home – and the UK tourism industry needs to wake up to the fact that there’s a glaring hole in its market.

Yes, rail travel has become ridiculously expensive – a last-minute return train from London to Penzance this weekend would set you back just shy of ￡115 and 5 hours and 42 minutes of your time – but, as we discovered earlier this year, you can hire a car quickly and conveniently through companies such as EasyCar for as little as ￡90 last-minute. Split that a couple of ways and it’s a bargain.

While Airbnb and various cottage stays are often the most affordable option for groups travelling together, those offering concierge services are undeniably the best when it comes to convenience – with the time saving alone almost worth the obscenely high price point in the spring and summer months.

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While savings are considerable out of season – and definitely worth it when compared to the cost of hotel rooms for a group – where these boutique, luxury companies are missing out is that many of them have yet to cash-in on the potential earnings that last-minute deals on empty properties could provide.

With millennials becoming ever more discerning about how and what they spend their money on when it comes to holidays – as well as ever more conscientious when it comes to the environmental impact of their travel – the UK is the next big market and getting the word out to those who could be easily swayed into a last-minute dash to the countryside for a reasonable price should be the next logical step.

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