The holiday you sneer at is telling on you

There is a small, embarrassed cough people do before admitting the holiday they want. You hear it at barbecues, in group chats, at the school-gate end of a long day. I know it’s a bit basic, but we’re thinking Bali. Or: Do not judge me, but the cruise leaves from Circular Quay and my mum can come too. The apology gets there before the sunscreen.

I know that cough because I have made it. Not about Bali, which I have loved in the ordinary, imperfect way one loves a place that has fed you and flattened you a little, but about the sort of travel that looks too easy from the outside. Resort pools. Airport transfers with a laminated sign. A tour guide with a clipboard and a voice trained to cut through coach air-conditioning.

By the third sentence, someone will usually supply the serious counterpoint. A destination can be overrun. Cruises can be grim. Package tours can turn a place into scenery and the people who live there into hospitality wallpaper. Fair. I am not waving that away. Sneering at the person who booked it, though, is a different habit, and that is where the conversation so often slips.

The argument, or maybe the old argument finally saying the quiet part out loud, comes from Sydney travel writer Ben Groundwater’s column about Bali, cruises and coach tours. He has spent only three days in Bali, he writes, yet finds the reflexive contempt around it telling. One line has the bluntness of a suitcase dropped on tiles:

Travel shouldn’t be a competition

Ben Groundwater, The Age Traveller

Simple, yes. Also weirdly difficult, because Australians have managed to turn leisure into a sorting ceremony. We do not just go away. We rank the going.

The apology before the booking

What gives travel snobbery away is how early it starts. Before the flight. Before the annual leave is approved. Before anyone has had the chance to be bored beside a pool or seasick in the Bass Strait. Judgement sits inside the idea of the trip itself, as if some holidays arrive pre-stamped with shame.

Bali takes the most heat because it is close, familiar and easy to caricature. Say Ubud and some people imagine linen and breathwork. Mention Seminyak and beach clubs appear in the mind. Say Kuta and watch the face close. Soon the country itself disappears behind Australian anxieties about the kind of Australian who goes there.

Groundwater’s point, and the reason it lands, is that this is rarely about pure taste. Taste would be: I do not enjoy that kind of holiday. Snobbery says: People who enjoy that kind of holiday have failed a test I passed. A whole social ladder hides in that tiny shift.

Earlier this year, a reader writing in SMH Traveller made a related anti-elitism case, pushing back on the easy habit of declaring an entire country overrated. The word is doing too much work. It might mean crowded, expensive or disappointing. It might also mean other people got there first and did not make us feel special.

I might be wrong about this, but the moral charge around a holiday often rises when the trip is legible. A week in Bali is legible. A cruise is legible. So is a coach tour through Europe. You can picture the lanyard, the buffet, the queue. The snob prefers holidays that need explaining, ideally with a small ordeal attached: two ferries and a dirt road; a guesthouse with no sign; a restaurant where the menu exists only in a language you do not speak, which is lovely when it is lovely and miserable when you are hungry and your phone is dead.

There is no virtue in exhaustion. There is only a story you can tell later.

Convenience is not a moral failure

Convenience is the part I keep coming back to. Not convenience as laziness. Convenience as access. A cruise can hold together grandparents, teenagers, dietary requirements, dodgy knees and the uncle who refuses to plan anything more complex than lunch. On a good week, a package holiday can give a tired person the rare sensation of not being in charge.

That is not nothing. In a Guardian first-person piece about selling up to live on cruise ships, Jeff Knapp describes a conversion that began after he had been on 20 cruises. His partner Debb had been on more than 150. Those numbers sound comic if you are committed to hating the form. Read another way, they look like evidence of a life built around ease, repetition and pleasure.

The cruise person is useful in this debate because they offend almost every rule of high-status travel. Returning to the same structure. Eating where other passengers eat. Accepting entertainment that announces itself. Making no pretence of discovery.

Good.

Discovery is a gorgeous word and a grubby one. Travellers use it constantly, often while standing in places that have been known, loved and argued over for centuries. Maybe the more honest ambition is smaller: to be away from your own dishes, to watch a child sleep through a transfer, to let your mother see three ports without hauling a suitcase through a train station.

A Business Insider account of multigenerational cruise travel gets at this unglamorous competence. Different generations were given different amounts of space and structure. Nobody had to win the itinerary. Nobody had to become the family project manager with sunburn.

Here is what the user of the supposedly daggy trip knows and the critic often misses. Convenience can be the holiday. Logistics are not a stain on the experience; they are the thing being purchased.

don’t yuck my yum

Ben Groundwater, The Age Traveller

I would usually roll my eyes at that phrase, because it has the sticky feeling of an office mug. Here, though, it does the job. It asks for a tiny pause between private preference and public contempt.

The better test is harm

None of this makes every holiday innocent. The snob is often wrong about people and sometimes right by accident about places. Bali has real pressure on infrastructure, land, waste and local communities. Cruise ships have environmental costs. Short-term rentals can squeeze residents. Coach tours can flatten a town into a lunch stop.

This is the line worth holding. Critique the harm, not the class code. Ask who is paid, who is displaced, who cleans up, who gets priced out. Ask whether the money stays in the place or exits through a booking platform before the guest has even found the pool towel.

Groundwater makes room for that distinction in his column, which is why the argument has more weight than a shrugging defence of anything-goes tourism. Some travel does damage. Plenty of travellers behave badly. Certain destinations are asked to absorb too much of our desire and too little of our accountability.

Cringe, however, is not harm. A person choosing Bali because the flight is manageable and the kids can swim is not committing an ethical failure by failing to choose your preferred island. Retirees joining a coach tour are not less curious because they do not want to drive on the other side of the road. Families on cruises are not automatically vulgar because the holiday has a schedule.

The harm test is harder than the taste test. It asks for specifics. It makes us talk about wages, zoning, emissions, water, overtourism and the dull machinery behind the glossy brochure. Taste lets us point at another traveller’s sandals and feel briefly superior.

I understand the appeal. Superiority is light luggage.

What hosts notice instead

One of the more useful perspectives in the researcher’s bundle came from the people who meet travellers after all our self-storytelling is done. A professional tour guide told Brisbane Times Traveller that Australian guests are often prized for low-fuss openness, the kind of behaviour hosts actually have to work with across a multi-stop trip.

That detail matters because it shifts the gaze away from the imagined hierarchy of destinations and towards conduct. Your host does not care whether the trip sounds good in a Fitzroy wine bar. They care whether you show up on time, listen, tip where tipping is appropriate, ask decent questions and understand that someone else’s home is not a set built around your transformation.

Good guest behaviour is wonderfully unromantic. Punctuality. Curiosity without entitlement. Volume control. Shoes where shoes belong. Being helped without treating the helper as invisible.

Maybe that should be the more interesting status game, if we insist on having one. Not where did you go, but how were you there? Did you learn the names of the people serving you? Did you notice when a place was tired? Did you spend money beyond the most extractive channel? Did your children understand they were guests, not customers in a country-sized resort?

I am wary of turning this into another purity ladder. Same trap, better shoes. Still, it feels more useful than ranking holidays by how difficult they are to explain.

The old prestige model rewards friction. The better one might reward attention.

Let people have their small escapes

This argument will not die because holidays are never only holidays. They are money, time, family history, bodies, fear, boredom, aspiration and the ache to be seen as the sort of person who chooses well. No wonder we get weird about them.

For some people, the dream is a hut at the end of a wet track and no reception. Others want the blessed sight of a breakfast buffet where a child can eat watermelon and toast without negotiation. Someone else wants a balcony cabin and a book, the same sea rolling past for days.

None of these is automatically more soulful. Some are just better photographed.

So yes, judge the company that sells fantasy while underpaying staff. Judge the traveller who treats a destination like a backdrop and local workers like set dressing. Judge the business model that pushes residents out of their own neighbourhood. Please, judge that.

But the woman who wants five days in Bali because she is tired and the fares were reasonable? The couple who love cruises because the ship lets them be old without feeling like a burden? The family on the coach tour because no one had the bandwidth to build a spreadsheet called Europe Final Final 3?

Let them go.

Tell the snobs to take a seat.

Ben Groundwater, The Age Traveller

I would put it more softly, but only a little. Take a seat, yes. Preferably somewhere with a view, a cold drink and enough humility to admit that most of us are not above the holiday we mock. We are just hoping nobody notices how much we want permission to rest.