Bremen - You’ll find them along the Spanish seaside, in the German countryside or on the most remote Cambodian island: holidaymakers with heads down peering at their smartphones.
The global proliferation of wi-fi offerings at hotels, restaurants and cafes has become an accepted part of the scenery in any tourist hot spot. The spread has been especially noticeable in the past five years.
But is it really a holiday if you find you can never tune out from the online world? If you spend all your time off staring slack-jawed into a screen?
Free wi-fi
Not only do tourists expect free wi-fi everywhere they go, they’re also being trained to expect web offerings made just for them. Some package holiday companies and tourist destinations are designing special apps and social media channels just for their visitors.
Anywhere you go, if you see a sad place that’s not offering free wi-fi, odds are the tourists are going somewhere else.
“Wi-fi is the must-have, an absolute essential for the guests,” says Renate Freericks of the Bremen Institute of Tourism Management and Leisure Research.
But being able to plug in all the time is changing the nature of holidaying.
How do you relax if the entire internet is available via a device you’ve always got with you?
Peter Zellmann, the head of the Institute for Leisure and Tourism Studies in Vienna, says it’s too early to declare holidaying a lost art.
“There are people who are perfectly content with this connection to their family or back to the office.”
These people find it soothing not to be cut off. “Especially the younger people want this umbilical cord. They don’t feel smothered by it at all.”
But does there come a point when having your smartphone on holiday is a distraction or even keeps a person from relaxing?
Freericks says it’s important to consider a person’s motives for going online. Sometimes people need information when they’re on holiday: if they’re using Google Maps to navigate a strange city, for example.
Tourists also benefit from being able to find hotel reviews, restaurant addresses and tips for sightseeing in just a few clicks.
And don’t forget the apps that help people find public toilets, translate foreign texts or convert currencies.
All in all, there are many ways smartphones make modern travel easier.
A lot of people also turn to their gadgets for the social functions: allowing them to communicate or share experiences with those back home. Freericks calls it “demonstrative consumption”.
“I have an experience and I share it right away.”
Of course, there are also the people who just can’t break their internet bonds, even when they’re on holiday. Those are the people by the Seine checking the news, reading a forum near the Grand Canyon or looking at Facebook outside the Taj Mahal.
For many, it’s a kind of mindless surfing that they do almost without thinking.
“People take this kind of automatic behaviour with them on vacation and don’t set it aside so easily,” says Freericks, agreeing that it’s a problem.
Julia Scharnhorst of the Professional Association of German Psychologists says for many people, turning to the smartphone is a rush to something familiar.
Different
“You’re in a place where everything looks different, where there are unusual things happening, and suddenly you start thinking about different things,” she says.
“Reaching for the smartphone gives people a way of getting back to the known world.”
But how to fight the urge if it threatens to detract from the holiday? Scharnhorst says it’s a matter of finding different ways to distract yourself.
“Let yourself be distracted rather than removed,” she says, advising people to look at the beach instead of their phone.
“Or just keep telling yourself that you’re stronger than your phone, she says, noting that the urge to pick up the phone all the time is just a sign of boredom.
Scharnhorst says it’s best to limit one’s internet consumption when on holiday, even if it’s difficult.
“Just checking your smartphone in the morning. That’s a routine we have to make a decision to break.”
In a worst-case scenario, just don’t turn it on in the first place.
ANA-DPA