I recently completed a 42-day odyssey to Thailand and Laos. For somebody from America, that is awfully long trip. Based on my experience as a professional travel agent in the United States, most my customers have typically taken vacations from 4 - 12 days, with the average being roughly 7-8 days. Occasionally I have had customers who have taken vacations for two weeks to 17-18 days but those have been far and few in between. However for a European - lets say somebody from Germany or France - 30-42 days is a vacation of average duration and based on my conversations with traveling Euros, many of them take a trip of 2-3 months duration or more. It’s not uncommon to find a Euro on an extended vacation of 6 months. Doing some research on the Internet, I have read that Europeans on the average receive 6 weeks vacation time and Americans, 13-14 days. Source: http://www.swlearning.com/economics/policy_debates/overworked.html
Typically, an American will take one 1-week vacation and two 3-4 days vacations.

So how does my 42-day odyssey stack up? Somebody from USA would view it as “a long time”, while somebody from Europe might view it as “a short time”. Your perspective depends on where you’re from…

Talking about long time - While hiking up to the waterfalls just outside of Luang Prabang (Laos), I met group of people from Holland who were in the middle of a year long vacation visiting Southeast Asia, India and parts of Africa. See picture, top left. Now that is a looooog time…..

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 13th, 2007 at 9:57 am and is filed under Thailand, laos, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.