Why We Don’t Like Talking About Bad Holidays

Imagine that you’ve had a place on your travel bucket list for years. You’ve always wanted to go to Thailand or to Paris or on a surfing holiday.

But when you actually go on your dream trip, the holiday doesn’t meet your expectations.

Perhaps it rains the whole time, you have some really bad meals, or things don’t look as you expected them to.

And when you get home, you might find it hard to admit to your friends, family and colleagues that you had a bad time.

According to Samuel Cornell from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, that’s because we live in a world where most of us are on social media, and “impression management” is very important.

We’re often trying to “manage” the impression that other people have of us.

That means we may sometimes try to present ourselves in a certain way — to look sophisticated, interesting or fun.

Pictures of a holiday or stories about a trip can help to make us look like we’re all of these things.

“A bad holiday can feel like a step backwards,” he wrote in The Conversation. In other words, if we tell the world we had a bad holiday, it shows that we failed and we’re not so sophisticated, interesting or fun after all.

But Cornell also points out: it’s unrealistic to expect travel to always be wonderful.

It’s really disappointing when your dream holiday becomes more of a nightmare, but you didn’t fail. It’s just that your expectations were different from reality.

And at the very least, a bad holiday can become a really good story!