Your mortgage is paid, your calendar is finally your own and, if you’ve been prudent, there’s a tax-free pension lump sum burning a hole in your bank account. Little wonder that for so many recently retired folk, travel is top of the agenda.
From taking that Arctic cruise to see the Northern Lights, to exploring the wonders of Machu Picchu, it’s the perfect time for the trip of a lifetime.
To be fair, as former sales and marketing director of Travel Department, travel has always been an important part of Yvonne Boyle’s life. But since she retired in June this year, aged just 60, she has thrown herself into it with even more gusto.
The first thing she did was book a 13-night trip to China.
RM Block
“The trip was brilliant. We did about three or four nights in Beijing, saw Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and went to the Olympics Park. It’s a lovely city because it’s very modern. The hotel we stayed in was very centrally located and you’ve loads of lovely shops and really ancient history as well, which was pretty phenomenal,” she says.
From Beijing she and her husband, who retired four years before her, took a bullet train to Xi’an. “It’s a city with a famous wall around it you can walk or cycle. But of course the big attraction is the terracotta warriors, which were amazing,” she says.
From there the couple travelled to Shanghai. “It’s a really modern city with buildings that are so tall they just blow your mind. We did a night-time boat cruise to see the lights because the buildings are just amazing. Everything is just built on such a grand scale. We’ve done loads of long hauls but this one was always on my bucket list.”
Retirement gave the couple the opportunity. “When you’re going to somewhere like China, it’s really good to have a guide with you and to have everything organised for you, because you’d find it hard to navigate on your own. You certainly wouldn’t get to see so much in such a short space of time by yourself,” says Boyle, who is already planning the couple’s next adventure.
“We’re looking at going back to parts of Africa now, and Japan is on the list as well. After that, we’re thinking of getting a camper van and touring around Europe. We planned our early retirement so that we could both have the free time to do all this together,” she says.
Take the grand tour
As commercial director of Travel Department, Boyle’s former colleague Claire Doherty sees daily just how keen people in the early years of retirement are to make the most of their new chapter by exploring more of the world.
“The most popular destinations for this particular age group doing bucket-list trips are Vietnam, India and China, to which people go in quite big numbers,” says Doherty. “But we are also seeing a trend for them to go to destinations that, even five years ago, they wouldn’t have, such as Colombia, South Korea, and Japan, which have also become popular.”
In Vietnam, many of this age cohort opt for a 14-night trip that enables them combine the buzz of the capital city, Hanoi, with a chance to slow the pace down and enjoy the views and the water on Halong Bay before heading on to Ho Chi Minh, the country’s largest city, and taking in the Cu Chi tunnels and floating markets on the Mekong river.
“The key appeal is the variety. You’re getting a little bit of everything. Asian cities can be very full on, but then you go on to visit somewhere that is really beautiful, with dramatic scenery, and on again to places where you have history and culture. You get to take in so much in one trip,” says Doherty.
Travel Department’s most popular trip in China follows a similar itinerary to Yvonne Boyle’s, while in India, among its most popular are those that explore Delhi, the Taj Mahal and Rajasthan, taking in the Pink City of Jaipur and the Amber Fort, and typically including a boat cruise around one of the lakes in Udaipur, the Venice of the East.
But part of the reason why demand for destinations such as Colombia, South Korea and Japan is growing among retirees is because many of them have already been to India, Vietnam and China, she points out. “People are just better travelled now, they’ve been to lots of places and are looking to go somewhere new,” she explains.
“Those people that are beginning to retire now are part of a generation that has grown up having already done a lot of Asia. They have the time, and the money, and what they want now to do something completely different, and somewhere like Colombia is much safer than it was years ago,” she says.
Early on in retirement is the best time to travel, “because you still can, and because you never know what’s going to happen, and because you still have the appetite for it,” she says.
“Typically, the further away our holidays go, the lower the age bracket is. This is long-haul travel, with busy days on coaches and trains going out to villages. It’s that nice age where you’re old enough to be able to afford it, have the time to do it, and are not too tired to be able to enjoy it.”
Time to get going
Travel industry veteran John Galligan is already lucky enough to have travelled almost everywhere. After decades as the country’s best-known luxury cruise specialist, he is set to retire from full-time work this summer – though staying on as an ambassador for Frosch Ireland, the group that bought out his business.
He too believes Irish retirees are becoming more adventurous – “because they’re more travelled,” he says. Among the most popular destinations in luxury cruises and expeditions are the Galápagos, the Arctic and Antarctica. Galligan tells members of his age cohort wondering whether they will be able for such expeditions that “if you can throw your leg over a bath you can go to Antarctica”.
He is currently planning his own next trip, to Bergen in Norway. After that on his personal travel bucket list are the remote havens of South Georgia in the South Atlantic, the Kimberly region of Australia and Svalbard, a group of islands between Norway and the North Pole.
Having built deep relationships with repeat customers, often over decades, one of the features that saddens him most is when customers talk about all the travel they plan to do in retirement but, it turns out, life, health, and even death, have other plans for them.
“It’s very upsetting,” he says. “So don’t leave it too late.”
