Piggybacking on public holidays to create longer breaks, taking off Mondays are among the tricks
4 min
It is barely past New Year’s Day. If you’ve taken the day off, congratulations: You have aced your first test of vacation-day math.
We get only so many days of paid time off a year. And that is if you’re lucky—one in five U.S. private-sector workers gets no PTO, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Without a strategy, you can have a generous number of vacation days and still feel like you never truly got away from it all.
Think of the times you took a mini-break from work only to feel stressed before and afterward. The average American worker with five years at the company gets 15 paid days of vacation in a year, BLS data show. That leaves little room for bad planning if you want a serious break or two, plus some long weekends and the occasional personal day.
Maxim No. 1: A vacation day equals more than a day of vacation when you attach it to a public holiday or two. Taking the day after New Year’s this year snags you a four-day weekend at the start of 2024. Timed just right between federal holidays and weekends, 15 days of PTO can turn into nearly 50 days of extended break time this year. (That is, if your co-workers don’t beat you to claiming those dates.)
Another guiding principle—Fridays off are overrated, and not just because they are peak traveling days. For a long weekend or a random personal day, there is evidence to suggest a Monday and Wednesday can be more satisfying. But more on that later.
First, some science: To really recharge, you need at least one weeklong vacation, bracketed between two weekends, research suggests.
In one study of more than 50 people who took vacations for an average two weeks, participants’ well-being levels didn’t peak until their eighth day off. A 2023 study of more than 300 vacationers found people who took between eight and 14 days off reported greater and longer positive effects once they returned to work, such as better sleep, than those who took shorter breaks.
One to two weeks off, in fact, appeared to have longer-lasting benefits than lengthier vacations. After a while, “you creep back to old habits,” says Ty Ferguson, a research associate at the University of South Australia in Adelaide who co-wrote the study. His own recent getaway—several days down the coast—went bust when his three children, ages five and under, came down with a bug. Then it was time to return.
“I should take more of my own advice,” he says.
One reason taking a week-plus vacation is important is that is enough time to actually reduce workloads. Network-equipment giant Cisco recently conducted a deep data dive on employees’ work habits and well-being, examining more than three years’ of metrics such as virtual meetings, badge-ins, PTO and engagement surveys. When workers took a day or two off, the number of meetings they had in the month didn’t change much—they just packed in more work before and after their time off.
Meeting loads dropped sharply for workers who took at least five consecutive days off. The fewer the meetings, the greater tendency to report healthier routines and better stress-coping abilities, Cisco found.
“I always believed in the long weekend because it can be so hard to take a week off,” says Cisco’s chief people officer, Kelly Jones. “I was wrong.”
To get the most out of your finite days off, consider Gail Martino’s PTO hack for 2024. “I’m a leisure laggard,” says the senior project manager in New Haven, Conn., of her habit of waiting to take vacation time until things get slower. (Hint: That is never.) Then there is a scramble to use it or lose it toward the end of the year, with the days she does take off feeling not terribly satisfying.
“You wonder, why am I so tired?” she says.
In recent years, she’s become a bird watcher and wants to take a couple of birding trips along the Eastern Seaboard in 2024. “I spend a week in the woods, among trees and nature, and that is an incredible break,” she says. “Now I want to chart out the entire year.”
Scanning the 2024 calendar, she devised a spreadsheet of dates bridging public holidays and weekends with a theoretical 15 vacation days and four personal days. (Working at Unilever for 18 years, she got about a week more PTO than that in 2023.) The result was 50 days of extended breaks, including 9-day stretches in July and over Christmas:
A little tweaking can wring nearly the same number of extended break days with just 15 vacation days and no personal days—that is, if you get a full slate of federal holidays off and don’t have to trade off with co-workers:
Want to take a three-day weekend that isn’t attached to a federal holiday? Take Monday off instead of Friday, suggests Jim Burch, a 38-year-old software engineer in Phoenix and an avid hiker. Taking Fridays off often results in cramming five days of work into four, he points out.
“I’d get so stressed out on the Thursday before,” says Burch, who at his current job, has more autonomy over his schedule than in earlier jobs.
Delaying gratification until Monday means your co-workers have no choice but to start the workweek without you. Back Tuesday, you can quickly catch up on whatever emails or developments you missed, he says.
Then there is the unexpected pleasure of a Wednesday off. “It is like a midweek weekend,” says Rachel Blenkhorn, a social-media production manager for a real-estate investment trust who lives in Warren, Mich. It is long enough to relax or take care of appointments yet short enough to get back in the work groove on Thursday, she says.
There is science as to why, says Dawna Ballard, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert in chronemics, the study of time as it relates to communication.
“Everyone has a different chronotype,” or their own biologically driven pace, she says. A break after two days’ work gives you a second chance in the week to return to your internal rhythm. Psychologically, it also creates a bit of “slack” in the workweek, alleviating the stress that comes from feeling like there is too little time to get everything done.
However you plot your vacation days in 2024, don’t leave any on the table. They aren’t just good for you, there is evidence they are good for your career.
An Ernst & Young study of its employees showed every extra 10 hours of vacation was linked to an 8% improvement in year-end performance reviews. Another study found people who took more than 10 vacation days a year were more likely to get a raise or bonus than those who took fewer days.
Now that is a formula anyone can get behind.
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AI-powered travel agents are challenging online booking platforms, but Airbnb’s exclusive listings and direct customer relationships could give it an edge. Its next challenge: turning repeat guests into loyal customers through stronger rewards and innovation.
3 min
AI agents like Muse can already find you the cheapest hotel room in Paris. But they can’t locate a cheaper version of that Catskills cabin you’ve been eyeing, because it might only be available on Airbnb ABNB -1.43%decrease.
Investors should pay attention to that distinction. When Meta Platforms META 3.38%increase launched its Muse agent last month, travel stocks including Booking Holdings BKNG -1.19%decrease, Expedia and Airbnb all fell sharply.
Airbnb, though, has a real chance to emerge as a winner from the upheaval. The catch: Its stock already reflects above-industry growth. To justify its valuation, Airbnb will need to turn repeat customers into loyal ones.
Online travel companies make much of their money by simplifying search and collecting fees on bookings. AI agents threaten that model.
But not all travel marketplaces are equally exposed. Booking and Expedia largely sell hotel rooms that travelers can also book directly or through competing sites. If an agent can find the same room elsewhere, it has little reason to favor either Booking or Expedia.
Booking and Expedia also sell sponsored listings that steer travelers toward particular properties. Wells Fargo estimates those will account for about 8% of Expedia’s revenue and a much higher percentage of profit next year.
Airbnb has more ways to adapt. More than half its listings are available only on its platform, and more than 90% of its traffic comes directly to its app or website.
The customer relationship doesn’t end after booking, either. Bernstein analyst Richard Clarke notes that 90% of Airbnb guests go on to message their hosts about arrival times, keys or local taxes, giving Airbnb a connection to both sides of the transaction.
How the companies have responded to the possible agentic future is telling.
Expedia quickly signed on as a Muse partner. Airbnb hasn’t, and Chief Executive Brian Chesky says AI chatbots have so far been a boon, sending customers to Airbnb’s website.
Chatbots might work for buying paper towels, he quipped at a Skift conference last month, but people enjoy planning trips. He argued that browsing dozens of homes isn’t something a text-based chatbot is well suited for.
Still, the AI jitters arrived just as Airbnb was persuading investors it deserved its pricey multiple. For years after its 2020 initial public offering, the stock—which trades around 25 to 30 times forward earnings—went nowhere. Investors saw a mature operator trading at a growth premium.
This year, Airbnb growth seems to be accelerating. The stock jumped in August after the company raised its full-year revenue-growth guidance with its second-quarter results. Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski credits a run of product improvements under a revamped leadership team.
Among the changes: letting guests reserve now and pay later, adding hotels, and a redesigned home page and app. Investors were also betting on what comes next, including thousands more hotels, car rentals and, eventually, advertising.
The irony is that some of those growth drivers push Airbnb closer to the kind of business Booking and Expedia run—the kind of business AI agents could threaten. Even if AI agents capture a large share of travel planning and booking, Airbnb would capture the demand. But it and others would slowly lose control over how customers find and choose properties.
That would undermine the advertising opportunity investors are counting on. The bigger point for Airbnb and other marketplaces is that losing control of customer acquisition could mean surrendering some of their pricing power and margins.
To bulletproof itself, Airbnb might look to another e-commerce giant that has so far kept AI agents at arm’s length: Amazon.
Like Amazon, Airbnb has a loyal customer base and hard-to-match supply. But it has nothing like Prime membership to make customers think twice before taking their business elsewhere.
That is where loyalty comes in. Business travelers stick with Hilton or Marriott because enough nights earn them perks. Leisure travelers rarely accumulate stays with one chain. Airbnb has millions of listings and plenty of repeat customers, but no broad rewards program. It has begun experimenting with credits on hotel stays, but it should make loyalty a priority, not just a promotion.
Airbnb also plans to launch its own AI agent next year. But travelers using an agent might still want it to search Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking and hotel websites alike, rather than limit itself to one company’s inventory.
Eventually, Airbnb might have to strike deals with agent makers, using its unique homes as leverage to negotiate favorable terms, says Gawrelski. Such deals, along with rewards for loyal guests, could over the long term eat into the company’s roughly 13% take rate, he adds. But if they bring in enough additional bookings, the trade-off could be worthwhile.
History offers a reason not to panic. The shift from desktop to mobile unsettled investors in Alphabet and Amazon, but both emerged as major beneficiaries. Companies with valuable assets can come out of a platform shift stronger, if they adapt quickly enough.
Airbnb has homes the bots can’t easily replace. Now it needs to give guests a reason to insist on booking them there.
