Ever ordered a second dessert at 11pm in Lisbon when you'd never do it on a Tuesday in February back home? You're not imagining the personality shift. A new survey of 14,673 adults across the US, UK, Canada, the EU, Australia and Latin America, carried out by the astrology-advice app Hint, suggests that a majority of us consciously behave differently when travelling — 61% said so outright, and that's despite most respondents describing themselves as routine-driven in normal life.
The interesting part is how deliberate it is. This isn't people claiming some spirit of the trip swept them away. Nearly half (47%) admitted they did something abroad specifically because it felt like the right thing to do on a trip, knowing full well they'd have knocked the idea back at home. In other words, we quietly swap our usual standards for a temporary, travel-specific rulebook.
Money is where this shows up most clearly. Around 38% said they'd bought something they'd normally deem unnecessary simply because it was tied to a place they may never return to. Holiday logic in action: the purchase isn't really about the object, it's about the memory, and that makes it easy to justify.
Time gets the same treatment. Some 42% said they'd stayed out later than they actually wanted because they couldn't bear to 'waste' a precious holiday evening. The maths is simple — you only get so many nights in a destination, so each one feels like it has to earn its keep.
What's striking is that travellers who break their home habits aren't ditching rules altogether. They're replacing one set of expectations with another, keeping a kind of internal ledger to justify the time, money and effort sunk into the trip. And plenty of us don't even clock the shift while it's happening: 35% said they got home surprised by something they'd done or agreed to while away.
Does that mean your holiday self is your real self? The research can't say. What it does suggest is that home routines are more negotiable than we assume. If you're the type who never splurges, lingers too long at dinner or says yes to a last-minute boat trip the moment you land somewhere new, that's a feature of travel worth leaning into — maybe the person you are for two weeks a year is worth listening to the rest of the time too.
For anyone planning a trip, there's a practical takeaway in here. Give yourself a small 'holiday guilt' budget for the things you'd usually talk yourself out of, and accept that a late night or an impulse purchase is often exactly what the trip was for. The version of you that books the excursions probably has a point.