Am I being unreasonable to think extreme day trips are excessive?

[SonnyHoney]

For instance, London Luton to Venice.
How can anyone enjoy leaving their house at 2 a.m. to fly out ridiculously early, spend a few hours somewhere walking around exhausted, and then fly back the same day?
It feels like people are just trying to collect places these days, rather than visiting somewhere because it's somewhere they've aways wanted to go.

Not sure if it counts but we've done this in the uk all the time. Mostly visiting ds1 who lives 4 hours drive away but we've done other stuff too, day trip to butlins etc. Accommodation is so expensive, we save a fortune.

Cork is on my to do list and I should be able to get a return for about £30-40.

I've been to Dublin a few times for work so seen most of the 'walking around highlights' already so less interested in that.

In Ireland I'd expect you have to be near Dublin (or Belfast?) to have good options, I don’t know if there's ever enough flights from other Irish airports?

I'd have thought your best bet would be Paris, Brussels, Alicante, Milan or Palma from Dublin as they seem to be the most common ones from the UK, even from smaller airports. Also Barcelona or Malaga. Possibly also Polish cities like Gdansk or Warsaw.

You often need to combine airlines eg go out in the morning with Ryanair and back in the evening with Aer Lingus, or whoever else operates from Ireland, Jet2 and Easyjet use Belfast I think?

Nah. I did loads of day trips when I could easily get to Gatwick. Didn't even need an early start to get a bit of shopping in, loaf around cafés, have dinner and a few drinks. Back around midnight, relaxed and happy.

Last day trip I did was Lisbon, the one before was Barcelona. Love both cities and am very sorry I now live too far from a useful airport.

XH1 and I used to drive over to France or Belgium for the day. Change of scenery, fabulous food, practise some French or Flemish.

Oh, and I once went to Caracas (from Brazil) for a party 😆

Didn't take any photos or have Instagram!

Ignore that. Either show up late, after all the baggage-laden passengers have queued to check in, or early and kill the two hours in the duty-free area.

People do it because it's often cheaper than driving down the road or taking the train in the UK, OP. That's because trains are way too expensive, flights are too cheaper, and Britain often is a rip off.

I can see why people would enjoy the novelty of a few hours in a city a long way from home. When the Eurostar started and I lived not too far from Waterloo, I went over to Paris for lunch and shopping a few times.

I fell strongly that we should be minimising how much we fly, given what we now understand about its environmental impact. The idea of a return flight in an aeroplane just to be a tourist for a few hours is somewhat distasteful.

As an extreme day-tripper, I’m going to say I disagree. I travel from a regional European airport on a 7 am flight to London/Paris wherever. Travelling luggage free means I can safely turn up 1 hour before departure there. The last visit was to the Second Life exhibition at Tate Modern so met a friend for breakfast, went to the gallery and exhibition, met a relative for an early dinner and got the 9 pm flight home. I was in my bed by midnight. I wasn’t even the only person on my flight doing it.

I’m OK with it, and I always have a day with a purpose to it. It’s also OK to not do it.

I spent some time with Holocaust researchers and one told me when she taught down in London a school would take a group of kids to Auschwitz for the day then come home that night. I was completely baffled by this and thought it was crazy, not in the least because hostels in Poland are cheap as chips but there you go.

The plane is only leaving because there's the medium-term demand for that number of flights. Obviously when people fly less, airlines reduce the number of flights!

Living on the south coast, I've done countless day trips into France and Belgium in the car. How is that different to a day in a UK city 3 hours away? First one was when I was 9 with school. Early 1980s, so it's not a new thing.

Ryanair flights were pence in the late 90s, so I did a few day trips then. Great days out.

"Extreme" day trips are nothing new. They've just been rebranded for the socials.

I think YABU.

There’s spending a week in a place and experiencing every little part of it, and there’s going and seeing what you can and having a good time. I’m off on holiday soon and I’ll be using one place as my “base”, and taking various day trips. I won’t be seeing every single thing that I could if I spent a week in each place, but I also know I won’t be getting the opportunity to spend a week in each place any time soon. So do what you can.

Commercial air travel accounts for 2-2.5% of total co2 emissions. It’s about 3.5% of all greenhouse gases. Even if it all stopped tomorrow it wouldn’t make a difference.

I think it’s fine and sounds like a lot of fun if that’s your style. There are limitations but there are also advantages and why shouldn’t people have a sense of adventure. It’s the more frequent flyer carbon footprint that I worry about - assuming that most day trippers are likely to take more than one or two trips per year.

I think they’re great. You don’t have to spend days somewhere to see a few sights, have some interesting food, absorb the vibe. It’s like going to any city for a day.

I can see why they’d be fun. There are plenty of places I’ve visited as day trips when I was already in a nearby city, with the same amount of time there as I’d get on an “extreme day trip”. It would be tiring but fine as a one off.

If the city had tons I wanted to see, I’d wait to do it properly. But there are plenty of places with just one or two things I want to do that could be done in a day.

Not if somebody does more than one of them, though, and I doubt that many of the people doing them spend the rest of their annual leave entitlement pottering around in the garden.

I don't own a car. Which means that my carbon emissions are less than about 80% of UK households without taking anything else into account.

According to Google, it would take about 18 or 19 European return flights per year to equal the carbon emissions of having as car.

If I take into account my commute by public transport to work, it comes up with a figure of 10-14 return flights per year.

My next planned short trip is an overnighter (accommodation is reasonably priced there). But I'm contemplating squeezing a day trip in before then.

If I do, that will be three return flights this year.

I can live with that.

Commercial air travel accounts for 3.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It doesn’t make a difference, in other words.

If you go on lots of them..good. the plane was flying anyway

I don't think it's excessive. Each individual has their own budget.

At least the airlines are more reliable than the trains.

So fun fact! If all commercial air travel stopped tomorrow, it would shave off a whopping 0.006°C from the global rate of warming.

Plane hop to your hearts content!

I’ve seen people go all the way to Lanzarote for the day. We’ve traveled there many times on the first flight out, around 6am. By the time we arrive at our hotel around lunchtime we’re completely exhausted and desperately in need of a shower. The last thing any of us would want to do is sight see!

I really can’t imagine enjoying this myself.

A friend and I do similar. We aren't museum goers, we like to visit cities, see the architecture of buildings. We generally tend to book a hotel for 1 night but it's pretty pointless as neither of us enjoy nightlight, we walk for up to 20 miles on the 1st day, use it as a way to have a good catch up, no kids, no dogs, no distractions. The morning is spent looking forward to getting back to the airport to head home.we take very few photos, we've travelled a lot (80+ countries), nano breaks or extreme days tick boxes for us now.

Car mileage and plane mileage are about equal in CO2/eq emissions per mile so I don't know whether this calculation is assuming very high car mileage, has accidentally counted multiple years of car ownership against one year of flights or the calculation has massively undervalued flights somehow but these numbers are off.

And every year going forward which is a significant amount.