people who travel often & for over a week, how do you get so much vacation time at work? or is your job flexible?

Princess2R

Mouseketeer
Joined
Jun 24, 2018
I'm trying to understand how people can go for 2 weeks and still have more time for more travel.

I'd love to ! I'm a stay at home mom now with freedom & time but not my own income (husband doesn't value Disney/ doesn't really care to travel)

And when I worked, I had terrible flexibility, 10 days vacation but 5 had to be taken at one time & I think unpaid time off was penalized or looked down upon.

So when I work again & can fund multiple Disney trips & travel, I'm going to have to find a job with better vacation time/ flexibility.
 
My husband and I both work at law firms that, technically, have “unlimited” time off. This is a trick to avoid paying us for unused time when we quit. In practice it means we may get slammed with a work “emergency” at any time on vacation and have to drop everything and work. But, in exchange, we can do that work from our purported “vacation.”
 
I get 3.5 weeks plus a week at Christmas.
Unfortunately we don't live near family and I like to chaperone my children's field trips so a fair amount of that gets taken as a "family obligation", rather than a vacation.
 
I work in registration at a Children's hospital urgent care on weekends only. They offer a program called "Weekend Only" where you work 2 twelve hour shifts, every Saturday and Sunday, and you are paid for 36 hours and given benefits. The downside is that you work every weekend all year, and only have 4 days off per year. So I only work 2 days/week for basically full-time money. I think this type of schedule is often offered in hospitals. We normally travel Monday-Thursday, so I can have Friday off to do laundry and grocery shop before going back to work on Saturday. Hope that helps! :) Best of luck!
 


We work 12 hour shifts, husband works hourly and I am salary. Official calendar is 3 days one week and the next week is 4 days, but my salary position means I have extra work on my days off. We both get around 25 days a year off. Husband can have 160 hours of vacation on the books as carry over all the time and his PTO has no limit (he has about 400 hours), my time is use it or lose it. We also get 8 weeks paid sabbatical every 7 years or 4 weeks every 4 years. Taking the 4 week next year and adding 7 days of vacation for 6 weeks off in a row.
 
I'm a nurse, so I accrue PTO... not sure how much it ends up being per year. But also with my schedule about every 3 weeks I'll have 8 days off without taking any PTO. Really easy to travel within that amount of time, or add some PTO days for a longer trip!
 


15 Vacation Days + 10 holidays that can either be used through the year or cashed out on the appropriate holiday. Flexibility is a problem as only one person in my current role can be out at a time and that's chosen by seniority so sometimes a little wheeling and dealing happens. Biggest problem is that vacation is picked in February for the next year so often we have to pay for vacations (April is a time when the wife and I like to travel) before knowing we'll get the time off.
 
In Ireland, and in most European countries we get approx 28 days paid time off plus public holidays. This is the law for all full time employees, yes even the 18 year old minimum wage burger flipper in McDonalds , if they work full time hours will get this.

Ireland Organisation of Working Time Act, 1997
An employee shall be entitled to paid annual leave equal to—
(a) 4 working weeks in a leave year in which he or she works at least 1,365 hours (unless it is a leave year in which he or she changes employment)
OR
(b) one-third of a working week for each month in the leave year in which he or she works at least 117 hours
OR
(c) 8 per cent. of the hours he or she works in a leave year (but subject to a maximum of 4 working weeks):


Most Irish people take 2 weeks in the summer, a week at Christmas, and then use whatever days are left at other times in the year. Technically 2 weeks holiday only adds up to 10 days PTO, as the weekends are not counted. Some people get creative, and plan their PTO with the public holidays, so Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Public Holiday Monday, then 4 days PTO, then another Friday, Saturday, Sunday, which adds up to a weeks holiday but only 4 days used from PTO.

I'm self employed now, so I just tell clients I'm unavailable for that week or 10 days. Also at Christmas, my clients close for almost 2 weeks.
 
We have a base of 2 weeks off (4 hours per pay period) which increases the longer you have been there. I currently am at 6 hours per pay period. I also work a lot of overtime in the summer, and for that we accrue additional time off instead of pay.
 
We could take 2 weeks off at a time if we wanted but we like long weekend type trips better. Anytime we’ve vacationed over a week we are always happy for it to be over. With taking shorter vacations we are also able to vacation more often as we can go during no peak times when it’s cheaper. As far as having time off my wife’s a teacher and I have a lot of flexibility with my job as my time off isn’t tracked.
 
My husband and I have both worked for the same company for more than 20 years each, so we are maxed out at 5 weeks of vacation. But next year we move to PTO (lose dedicated sick time), so we have to figure out how to be off for 7 weeks each year now. Before we maxed out, we could each "buy" an extra week of vacation, which was basically unpaid time off deducted a little at a time from each paycheck.

The rough part is that my husband is in a job that makes it hard for him to take time off (chronically understaffed), and they go nuts every time we take more than a week at a time or when we are somewhere with limited or no internet. We're taking a 2 week European river cruise next summer and there is no internet. It's going to be sooooo nice.
 
We live off of my husband's income and he gets 5 weeks off a year. But I work just a crap jobs with no benefits other then I can take off whatever time that I want. That income pays for my vacations. I usually go solo for 2 weeks in October for the F&WF. We also don't spend money on other things. We work and we go home. I don't spend money on Starbucks, purses, clothes, etc. I get the bare minimum. I don't even have knick knacks or pictures on my walls, not even holiday decorations. I just don't spend money on stuff like that.
 
Mine is done in hours lol just to confuse the system worse. Vacation Time and Sick time are the same time, so I have to budget my Vacation Time just in case I get sick. Basically I get what ends up being 4 work weeks (5 days each) off total. 3 are meant to be Vacation and one is meant to be sick time. I usually only take 2 weeks (separately) for vacation (one at Christmas and One in the Summer). 1 gets used for sick/unforseen and one rolls over the next year as buffer. I also get the federal holidays off... My husband just gets 2 days off per month and basically has been sitting on a large pile of rolled over days. I think he has more than 60 days off saved up for no apparent reason other than we don't seem to know how to take proper vacations lol.
 
When I lived in London, I had almost 4 weeks paid holiday by law. The company I worked for (restaurant management) gave me an extra week for every 2 years working there. When I moved home to NY, I had almost 2 months paid holiday. Sigh.

The company I worked for pre-pandemic gave 2 weeks PTO. When the company filed for bankruptcy (hiding behind the virus as an excuse), they refused to pay out any accrued PTO to their management. Yes, Im bitter.

Prior to the 2 years working for that company, I managed privately-owned restaurants. No paid holiday or health insurance given. Any time off was out of pocket. I usually picked up server & bartending shifts a few months prior to any holiday to fund the trip.
 
I get 6 hours paid leave every two weeks (increases to 8 soon), plus all federal holidays. my wife is a stay at home mom. I usually use the holiday/weekend trick to maximize my time. In addition, my wife and I use our tax return and two extra checks a year as travel money, straight into our travel account. We are also DVC owners, so that lowers the cost of hotels. The two extra checks per year come from the fact that we budget two paychecks a month, well it sop happens that twice a year there are three pay periods in spring and fall/winter. So that money is basically mostly extra. While we do travel to Disney during times when school is in session, we work with our kids teachers to make sure they are ahead before we leave and catch up on anything missed when we return. Summer is much easier to do our cross country road trips.
 
Truthfully, my vacation days comes with service years with a company/industry. I had 15 days at my last company. A former coworker pushed for me to move back to my prior industry for the company she now works and part of getting me there was the offer of 20 days starting due to my prior experience.

OP: my suggestion is to start researching job postings in your area and find out what positions you are qualified for that have flexibility and decent time off. Some companies I have worked for allowed me to take days without pay or work extra hours for a shorten week.
 

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