‘Holiday head’ puts travellers at risk, warns Safer Tourism Foundation

Many of the accidents suffered by tourists could be attributed to travellers overestimating their physical capabilities, while slips and trips remain the most common incident types, according to the Safer Tourism Foundation. Sharing key insights from its 2022–23 customer incident data, the UK charity also stressed that the chances of an incident occurring when on holiday were ‘incredibly low’, and fatalities ‘extremely rare’.

Every year the Safer Tourism Foundation aggregates and analyses anonymised data from UK travel brands along with other sources such as media reports, consular intelligence and coroners’ reports. Key findings from the 2022–23 customer incident data included:    

• Incidents are ‘often due to a mismatch between the type of trip/activity and the physical capabilities of the traveller’ – typical of the mindset known as ‘holiday head’
• Slips, trips and falls are the most common incident types, accounting for nearly one in five non Covid-related incidents
• Of the more than seven million trips accounted for in the data, only 0.38 per cent resulted in any kind of incident being reported to the travel company
• Fatalities are extremely rare – less than 0.2 per cent of reported incidents – and are often linked to underlying health conditions 
• Allergic reactions, most often to food, are becoming of increasing concern.

Writing in a blog post on the charity’s website, Katherine Atkinson, Chief Executive of the Safer Tourism Foundation, explained the ‘holiday head’ phenomenon.

“Optimism bias abounds on holidays – the idea that nothing bad will happen to us … It can be a good thing – the sense of optimism and being outside of our normal routine makes us more likely to try things we wouldn’t usually at home, taste new foods, go on a hike, try a water sport for the first time.

“But the ‘holiday head’ can also lead to people pushing their bodies beyond their limits, may contribute to them thinking they are more physically fit than they really are or inadvertently eating something they shouldn’t. We always encourage travellers to make sure they have the right travel insurance for them, so that if anything does go wrong, they are supported appropriately.”

The Safer Tourism Foundation works with leading UK travel brands to achieve the aims of its Safer Tourism Pledge, which include saving lives and reducing preventable injury and serious illness to people on holiday.

Recently, medical and security services company International SOS released its safety advice for travellers over the holiday season.