London to Sweden for the day: These travelers are embracing extreme day trips
The family caught an early morning flight from London Stansted Airport, grabbed a ride share to the park after landing in Gothenburg and arrived just as Liseberg's gates opened at 11 a.m. They spent the entire day tackling the rides and shows with their daughters, ages 11 and 13, and enjoyed a meal at an Italian restaurant before leaving for the airport at 9 p.m. to catch their flight home.
The Earls' flights cost £24.99 (around $34) each, roundtrip. Add to that four theme park tickets and other expenditures for the day and the total came out to roughly the same as what the family would have spent for entry tickets alone to an amusement park near their home on England's South Coast, Earl says.
For the foursome, the Swedish jaunt was one of five day trips around Europe they've taken so far this year. They've traveled there and back for the day from England to places like Dublin, Venice and Palma de Mallorca in Spain – all while keeping airfare costs under £25 per person and arriving home in time to sleep in their own beds.
While the United Kingdom — with its low-cost air carriers offering frequent connections throughout Europe — is a hub for 'extreme day trips' like the ones the Earls embarked on this year, people have also tried it in the US and beyond.
The practice is not without its environmental drawbacks, but fans of the one-day trip say it's a fun and satisfying way to get a taste of a new place, especially when budgets and vacation time are limited.
Earl's daughters liked their Sweden day trip best of all, he said, but spending a day in Venice, where they clocked more than 17,000 steps exploring the city, was tops for him.
With school holidays making it hard and expensive to travel for much of the year, the travel hack feels rewarding, he says.
'Doing these day trips on a weekend outside of school and work hours, it kind of works from a budget point of view. It's allowing us to do lots of little mini adventures throughout the year,' Earl says.
The sometimes exorbitant price of train fares across the UK compared to those in many other European countries paired with the ample options for cheap flights on budget airlines like EasyJet and Ryanair from cities like London, Edinburgh and Manchester has sparked this day-trip trend among British travelers.
A Facebook group, Extreme Day Trips, currently has nearly 324,000 members who share tips on everything from the full breakdown of how every hour of their day trip played out to restaurant suggestions in places like Prague and Milan and just-scored airfare deals. All-in and itemized pricing info is sometimes shared; one member's recent extreme day trip from Sheffield to Pisa cost her £121 (about $163) including flights, ground transport and food and drinks.
Michael Cracknell, a UPS driver and wedding photographer from near Brighton on England's South Coast, says he created the group in 2022 'purely as a way of showing people who are based in the UK that there are alternatives to our overpriced public transport system and overpriced days out within this country.'
In 2019, when looking for a day out somewhere, he passed on city trips at home in England and turned his sights farther afield, catching flights for day trips to places like Switzerland, Germany and Spain.
In 2022, Cracknell realized he'd been to 22 different countries just for the day, and the idea to start the Facebook group was born.
Today, Cracknell and several other unpaid group administrators serve as facilitators and guides for extreme day trips. Demand far exceeds the space available, he says. Group trip dates are released months in advance on the Facebook page and thousands of people apply via a form, but the trips are limited to 20 or 30 people, Cracknell says.
He tells the travelers who secure a slot (the selection process is random) the exact flights to book, what train tickets to reserve and information about any other attraction tickets and logistics they'll need to book themselves before meeting with the group at the airport for an early morning flight.
Cracknell said he has led more than 500 people on extreme day trips in recent years to locations in Switzerland, one of his favorite countries for spending an unforgettable day. He is guiding two group trips to Athens from London later this year as well as 10 more day trips to Switzerland. Cracknell tries to keep total costs from London Gatwick for such trips to around £170 (about $228) per person or less.
'The Swiss Alps offer an easy day out for these people that's something completely unique that 95% of them have never done before. And they go back to work on Monday morning, still buzzing from it. They say to their work colleagues, 'Guess what I did at the weekend? We went to Switzerland,'' he says.
The logistics of finding the cheapest airfares for out and back day trips can be time-consuming as it often involves booking flights on two different airlines, says Rick Blyth, who runs the website ExtremeDayTrips.com. (The website is not related to the Facebook page, which came before it, but Cracknell and Blyth collaborate on some projects).
The site's free flight tool lets users search for low-cost, low-demand flights from their home airports across the UK to destinations across Europe.
It also has day itineraries for packing a weekend's worth of fun into a single day in cities and regions including Lisbon, Lake Como in Italy and Finnish Lapland. A paid premium version of the website, with an annual fee for members (currently £35 per year or about $47), just launched and allows users to further customize their extreme day trip flight searches.
And when it comes to where to go for the day and what you can see and do there, those options are the stuff of travel dreams, Blyth says.
'You've got this choice of getting an expensive train to somewhere you already know or sitting on the motorways stuck in traffic — or getting on a cheap flight and going exploring Lapland, or the desert in Morocco, or going to a spa day in Bucharest, visiting Barcelona, going on a hike on Caminito del Rey in Malaga. There's just so much you could do,' he says.
The environmental toll of taking short-haul flights — just because they're inexpensive and you can — is impossible to ignore. In 2023, France banned short-haul domestic flights where train journeys of 2.5 hours were available instead to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Blyth says he doesn't pretend extreme day trips are guilt-free travel, but it's worth considering that people traveling this way usually travel light and opt for low-demand early morning and late-night flights. He says they're often filling seats on empty planes and therefore lowering the overall carbon imprint per passenger. ExtremeDayTrips.com will plant six trees for every premium member that signs up for the new service and 12 trees for every premium plus member, he adds.
He also contends that skipping hotel stays cuts down on hidden energy costs related to things like laundry and air conditioning.
There are other impacts to consider, too. Extreme day trip might leave you feeling more exhausted than refreshed by the time you make it home, says Georgia Fowkes, a travel advisor for Altezza Travel.
Fowkes says she has noticed growing interest in one-day trips, likely driven by the rise of affordable and frequent flights. But she says that after one or two of them, travelers might realize that such a packed trip took too much energy for the rewards reaped.
'The typical one-day itinerary tends to be overly ambitious when accounting for the time spent at airports, waiting in lines and commuting. A great brunch and a cappuccino won't save the day,' she says.
Earlier this year, Fowkes took advantage of a flash sale on US low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines to travel from Pittsburgh to Chicago for the day to visit friends. Her flight left before sunrise from Pittsburgh and returned after midnight, at which point she was utterly exhausted from the long hours of sightseeing and time in transit.
'I was wrung out. And in reality, my one-day trip cost me two more days to fully get back into my routine. This is the part of one-day trips that people rarely talk about,' she says.
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American influencer Kevin Droniak , who is based in New York City, chronicles his solo day-trip adventures in the US and beyond on Instagram and TikTok (New York City to the Grand Canyon or Montreal for the day, for example).
But the UK's abundant cheap airfares on budget airlines with relatively short flights to countries all over Europe, as well as access to destinations in North Africa and the Middle East, make it ground zero for the trend.
For Earl, extreme day tripping has been a way of doing economical mini-adventures and a great opportunity to get a taste of different countries at his family's doorstep.
'If you go there and actually quite like what you're seeing, it's like, 'We'll come back here for longer next time and make a long weekend of it, or a week or two-week holiday,'' he says.
And while Earl says he plans all his family's trips on his own, traveling unguided and using Skyscanner to search for flights that meet their £25-or-less parameter, he loves the Extreme Day Trips Facebook group for inspiration on where to go next.
'We very much would like to go and do the Alpine coaster in (Churwalden) Switzerland later in the year, if flights and cost allow. We're also looking at Norway, Portugal, Luxembourg and Germany, specifically Berlin,' he says.
The family is hoping to visit a total of 12 countries together in 2025 on single-day hops from England.
Terry Ward is a Florida-based travel writer and freelance journalist in Tampa who has traveled the world for three decades but has yet to try an extreme day trip.
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