As summer gets underway, many families will be preparing for their holidays. There are flights to book, bags to pack and endless decisions about where to go and what to do once you get there.
Yet when people look back on holidays years later, it's rarely the practical details they remember. Instead, it's often the unexpected funny moments, a game of cards that became a nightly tradition, getting caught in a downpour, discovering a favourite restaurant by accident or treating everyone to a daily ice cream.
For many families, holidays provide something that's increasingly difficult to find during the rest of the year: uninterrupted time together.
Stepping away from everyday life
Family life today is busier than ever. Work commitments, school schedules, extracurricular activities and constant notifications can leave little room for meaningful connection.
Holidays create a rare opportunity to step outside those routines. Without the usual pressures of work and home life, families often have more time to talk, explore and simply enjoy one another's company.
Research consistently shows that strong relationships are among the biggest contributors to long-term wellbeing and life satisfaction. The Office for National Statistics includes social relationships as a key measure of national wellbeing, with high levels of satisfaction in this area closely linked to overall quality of life.
While a holiday may only last a week or two, the connection it fosters can have far longer-lasting benefits.
The memories that stay with us
A recent survey of UK adults found that childhood holidays are among the memories people treasure most, ranking ahead of birthdays, Christmas and receiving a first pet. Perhaps more interestingly, respondents said it was the time spent with family, rather than the destination itself, that made those trips memorable.
That may explain why so many people return to places they visited as children. The same survey found that more than seven in ten adults had revisited a destination from their childhood, often to share those experiences with the next generation.
While destinations change, the reasons we remember them often stay the same: the people we were with and the experiences we shared.
The rise of the experience economy
The growing popularity of experiential spending reflects a broader shift in how people think about value.
Research has repeatedly shown that spending money on experiences tends to generate more lasting happiness than spending on material possessions. Experiences become part of our identity, strengthen social bonds and create memories that can be revisited for years.
Barclays has described this trend as the rise of the "experience economy", noting that consumers increasingly prioritise memorable experiences that carry personal meaning over purely material purchases.
Family holidays sit squarely within that trend. They represent an investment not only in travel itself, but in shared memories.
The lasting impact
For many families, holidays become part of a larger family story.
The best holidays don't end when the trip is over. They become the moments revisited around the dinner table and retold at birthdays, anniversaries and family gatherings,
Time spent together helps maintain relationships between grandparents, parents and children that may otherwise be limited to video calls and occasional visits.
What begins as a week away can become a story that is shared for decades.
Sources
Office for National Statistics (ONS); Jet2holidays UK Consumer Survey (2025); Nature Communications Psychology (2024); Barclays Consumer Research (2024).
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