Effects of vacation from work on health and well-being: Lots of fun, quickly gone

Abstract

Although vacation from work provides a valuable opportunity for recovery, few studies have met the requirements for assessing its effects. These include taking measurements well ahead of the vacation, during the vacation and at several points in time afterwards. Our study on vacation (after ) effects focused on two related questions: (1) Do health and well being of working individuals improve during a vacation? and (2) How long does a vacation effect last after resumption of work? In a longitudinal study covering seven weeks, 96 Dutch workers reported their health and well being levels two weeks before a winter sports vacation, during vacation and one week, two weeks and four weeks after vacation on seven indicators. Participants' health and well being improved during vacation on five indicators: health status, mood, tension, energy level and satisfaction. However, during the first week of work resumption, health and well being had generally returned to pre vacation levels. In conclusion, a winter sports vacation is associated with improvements in self reported health and well being among working individuals. However, these effects fade out rapidly after work resumption. We propose a framework for future vacation research and suggest investigating the role of vacation type, duration and means to prolong vacation relief.

Vacations Over the Years: A Cross-Lagged Panel Analysis of Tourism Experiences and Subjective Well-Being in the Netherlands

“…Research under the subjective well-being view suggests that the effects of tourism experiences on happiness are generally affective and short-lived (Mitas et al 2017). As the title of one study puts it, tourism experiences are "lots of fun, quickly gone" (de Bloom et al 2010). In the present study, we argue that this finding, though common, is an artifact of the limited data sets on which these studies are based.…”

“…Kroesen and Handy (2014) collapsed positive and negative affect into a single item, whereas we dealt with positive and negative affect separately, and used a validated multi-item scale for each. Studies linking positive affect to tourism experiences using validated multi-item scales have generally shown positive but short-lived effects under a "peak" model, wherein positive affect rises before a tourism experience, up to the middle of the experience itself, and declines afterward (de Bloom et al 2010;Mitas et al 2012a;Nawijn 2010). Our findings extend this literature to suggest that the peak model not only applies for time scales ranging from one tourism experience (Nawijn 2010) to 1 year , but also on a multi-year scale, in that years with more tourism experiences are followed by years with more positive affect.…”

“…The broaden-and-build theory alleges that brief experiences of positive emotions, which are salient during tourism experiences (Mitas et al 2012b), build resources such as friendships and creativity, which often last several years or more and contribute to life satisfaction in turn (Fredrickson 2001). Along the same lines, theories about the conservation of personal resources, such as effort-recovery theory, allege that exhaustion due to work and daily hassles must be regularly offset by periods of recovery, such as tourism experiences, to maintain long-term well-being, including life satisfaction (de Bloom et al 2010). In a sense, the broaden-and-build theory explains how tourism experiences may contribute to life satisfaction via positive experiences, whereas effort-recovery theory explains this effect via (fewer) negative experiences.…”

“…There is extensive empirical support for broaden-and-build processes (Fredrickson et al 2008;Garland et al 2010;Cohn et al 2009). Furthermore, theories about conversation of personal resources posit a somewhat comparable process for regulating negativity arising from work and daily hassles (de Bloom et al 2010). Thus, it is likely that tourism experiences contribute to both affective and cognitive components of happiness over a multi-year timespan.…”

Residential Tourists’ Perceptions of Quality of Life: Case of Alanya, Turkey

“…In this study area, research focused on either tourists' QOL or locals' QOL (for a comprehensive literature review, see Uysal et al, 2016). Studies on tourists' QOL investigated different perspectives such as demographics of tourists and QOL (Wei & Milman, 2002;Kim et al, 2015), contributions of different type of vacations to QOL perceptions (de Bloom et al, 2010;Dolcinar et al, 2012), contributions of holiday taking to different domains of QOL (Neal et al, 1999;Gilbert & Abdullah, 2004), and effect of different travel motives on QOL (Dolcinar et al, 2013).…”