Incommunicado : The Vacation for the ‘90s: Getting Away From It All

When Patricia Stanley takes a vacation from her management job, she leaves it all behind. “I don’t even phone home,” she says. Bill Hendricksen left his business for five days at a beachside hotel in Cabo San Lucas last month and did nothing more strenuous than splash over to the pool’s swim-up bar. Last year, Barbara Casey was incommunicado for a week while on a train in Spain; next month, it’ll be Bali where she will avoid calls from her public relations agency.

Vacations are much more precious these days to business executives and managers, so when they take time away from the job, they really want to be away, say travel agents, leisure companies and executives themselves.

Unlike the 1980s, when managers and executives seemed to want to be plugged in whenever and wherever they traveled, today these same bosses favor resorts and other destinations that are off the beaten track of the information superhighway.

“It’s not like the atmosphere of the ‘80s, when [business people] would go on vacation but be wired the whole time--wired with faxes, modems, laptops,” said Jim M. Roberts, president of Uniglobe Regency Travel in Rancho Cucamonga. “Now I don’t know anyone like that. . . . It’s as much a mental as physical vacation.”

Stanley agrees: “For my vacation, I like to jump off the end of the Earth.”

“There is no way” she’d want to be in contact with Marina Bank in Marina del Rey, where she is an assistant vice president and operations manager, if she could be river rafting or teeing off at a golf course on one of the Hawaiian islands, she said. “There have to be people competent enough in your absence to take care of any crisis. If there aren’t, there’s something wrong, unless perhaps you’re the owner.”

All-inclusive vacation packages, where transportation, hotels, meals--even drinks--and activities are included for one price, are especially popular now, particularly with time-stressed executives, travel agents say. All-inclusives include both cruises and land packages, such as Club Med and Sandals, a growing all-inclusive company with popular sites in the Caribbean.

James Cammisa, publisher of Travel Industry Indicators, a research and travel trend newsletter, said all-inclusives satisfy the “growing time-sensitivity” of Americans, especially executives. There’s less planning required. And once there, vacationers don’t waste time trying to figure out what to do, he said.

Of course, hotels and other businesses catering to vacationers have noticed these trends and have begun offering more package deals. According to a survey of travel agents taken by Cammisa’s organization, all-inclusives and cruises account for more than half of all bookings to warm-weather resorts. Several resorts in the Hawaiian Islands are now offering all-inclusive deals. And, said Roberts, it’s getting hard these days to find a tourist spot in Jamaica that doesn’t offer them.

Larger hotel chains have joined in, too. Some include meals and free programs for children, such as Hyatt Hotels’ “Camp Hyatt.” Hilton Hotels Corp. this year introduced “select” packages at 23 of its 43 resorts. With the package, guests choose one major activity each day from a variety of offerings--such as golf, tennis, or a visit to the health spa, depending on the resort. The activities are included in the room rate.

By choosing such packages, executives are saying “if I’m going to commit to not communicating with my office, I don’t want to make any decisions at all,” said Robert Dirks, senior vice president of marketing for Beverly Hills-based Hilton.

Hendricksen, who owns Inland Cold Storage Inc., a Riverside warehousing company, said he leaves most of the details to his travel agent. The decisions he made while he and his wife vacationed in Cabo San Lucas were easy ones: where to put the pool lounge chairs, which books to read.

Like many other executives these days, Hendricksen takes frequent, but short vacations--particularly long weekends. “Recently, I’ve been going as frequently as possible,” he said.

Travel agents say the premium put on vacations these days can be attributed to the economic stresses that businesses and their managers have been under since the recession. The “doing more with less” maxim that has created new challenges in the workplace has seeped into managers’ personal lives.

Paula Singleton of Sunrise Travel in Mission Viejo said the trend of frequent, short trips is continuing among her clients, who are primarily business executives and managers. And she has noticed other indications of their precarious work environment: More of her clients are waiting until the last minute to make vacation plans, and more of them are setting financial limits.

“It could be,” she said, “that their jobs are less secure. I am seeing people who used to plan six to seven months in advance for a family of four coming to me and saying they want to go next month, they can spend only so much and what can I do for them.

“They’re telling me the numbers--they’ve never done that before,” she said, explaining that in the past, clients came to her with an idea or destination, then asked how much it would cost. “They’re setting the budget, they’re much more aware and they’re limiting us.”

At Associated Travel Management in Santa Ana, Sally Howie is manager of the Medallion Club, a private division that caters to the well-traveled executive seeking the unusual destination or needing extra planning for personal vacations. Many of her clients don’t need to worry about budgets, but more are value-conscious these days and they, too, are putting a higher premium on the time they have available for vacations, she said.

More of her younger clients are taking their children along on vacations than in the past, Howie said, and even the most luxurious tours are now providing special programs and pricing for children.

In part, travel agents say, this is attributable to the growing number of families in which both parents work--and thus have less time to spend with children--and to changing attitudes about the importance of family compared to work. “Fifteen to 20 years ago,” Howie said, “they didn’t take young children on exotic vacations.”

These younger families headed by executives tend to take more, shorter vacations through the year, she said: “The older they are, though, the longer they travel.”

Cammisa, Travel Industry Indicators publisher, said business people are squeezing in vacation time whenever they can, often in combination with business trips. Casey, a partner in Casey & Sayre in Santa Monica, said she’ll hit the folk art bazaars in Bali after a work-related trip to Singapore’s new International Convention Centre.

“I like to be inaccessible. That’s why I like places like Bali,” Casey said. “I don’t think it’s a vacation if you’re on the phone all the time with the office or returning faxes.”

Yet many managers can’t quite sever their ties to work. One consultant who looks for golfing packages said, “when I’m on vacation, I want to be on vacation--but I’m always available for any [office] emergencies.”

Then there’s the brokerage company executive who went with his wife to the Kona Village on the big island of Hawaii earlier this month.

There, for rates upward of $325 a night, guests stay in “huts” designed to foil communication with the outside world: no telephones, no modem lines, no televisions.

Nevertheless, the executive just couldn’t leave the world wholly behind. He took his cellular phone with him.