Trips vs. Vacations

What’s the difference?

What is the difference between a trip and a vacation? Is it when the notifications on your device are switched off? Is it length of stay? Is it when it occurs: a weekend vs. during the week? Is the amount of planning that goes into it? Did you spend months, or years, planning? Is that a vacation? If you book flights & hotel two weeks before is that a trip? Does it require taking PTO? What about cost? Is a trip cheap(ish) and a vacation expensive? These are questions that are going to have different answers for different people at different stages of life. If you are retired there is no longer PTO, but travel to a “bucket list” destination. If you are at the point in your career that you are in the C-Suite you may not even get PTO and have “unlimited vacation”. For us, we do have our definition of a trip vs a vacation.

Trips

We take mostly trips. For us Trips usually involve nothing more than carry on and exploiting long weekends that include holidays in order to maximize PTO or minimize days out of school. Often times there is not much planning. Sometimes it may not involve PTO instead checking the phone and answering emails while in queue for Peter Pan’s Flight or For instance as I write this we are leaving for a weekend trip to Disney World in order to ride the Carousel of Progress one last time before present day Imagineers get ahold of it. We booked the trip from our Verandah during our Alaska Cruise onboard the Wonder while in the port of Ketchikan. Airfare, a resort stay at the French Quarter, and a weekend at Pets Hotel for the dogs all ready to go before we even ended that Vacation. As of this writing Emily doesn’t know we’re going. Our flight leaves at 5AM Friday, we’ll tell her Thursday evening when we pack.

Of course we also have 97W which expands where we can go. In the summer if we have nothing else going on, and weather looks good, we can be to the Wisconsin Dells in about 2 hours, Dollywood in 3, and Silver Dollar City in about 90 minutes.

As of writing we are planning on taking another Trip down to Orlando in July. The (grand)Parents will be joining us for part of the trip. We are staying in a Hilton Grand Vacation resort and that means at least one trip to Publix. If we go to Publix, or H-E-B, we tend to count it more of a trip. But Mom will be working during the day and going to the parks in the evening. We are also driving and including a day at Six Flags Atlanta on the way home as a part of the trip. It certainly will not be a vacation despite a several months of advanced planning, going to multiple destinations, and it being during a week without holidays.

What about cruises? We’ve been on 3 night cruises that are definitely trips, our 2025 Cruise on the Wish and our upcoming Baja Cruise on the Wonder in Jan 2026 certainly count as trips. However our first 3 night cruise on the Magic…that was the first Vacation we had been on since Emily was born.

What is a Vacation?

Disney Wonder in Alaska, stock image provided by Unsplash

In order for us to consider travel a vacation it has to meet the following criteria: unplugged and relaxed. As I eluded to earlier, our first cruise on the Magic was a Vacation even though it was just 3 nights. Why? We disconnected from our phones and once we hit the pool deck the weight of the world dropped off our shoulders and we were relaxed. Everything from that point forward was taken care of for the three days. We weren’t worried about food, cleaning, or entertainment. Of course we didn’t think we would be taking multiple cruises per year to the point where special became routine. After our first cruise on the Magic we generally consider any cruise with Days at Sea to be a vacation. Any cruises without at least one day at sea is just a trip.

Magic Kingdom, Disney World. Stock Image provided by Unsplash

Visiting the Orlando parks are sometimes a vacation…other times just a trip. For us the difference between a trip and vacation is whether we spend any days at a hotel or resort and not going to a park. When we visited Orlando for Thanksgiving…that was a vacation even though we stayed at a Condo and often ate breakfast and dinner at the Condo. But we did spent a couple days not going to parks and enjoying the resort pools and other amenities. Meanwhile none of our stays at the Disney Resorts (Grand Floridian, Contemporary, French Quarter) are what I would call trips. Why? We hardly spent anytime at the resorts. In fact we’ve never spent a single minute at a Disney Resort pool. We are at the parks as soon as they open till fireworks at night when we go. It is also the reason why we typically do not like staying at the resorts as it’s a lot of money for a place to sleep.