Escape your family for the holidays

When Lulis Leal’s family gets together for Christmas, she is usually sunning herself on a beach surrounded by palm trees and turquoise waters, with not one extended relative in sight.

For more than 10 years, Leal has been spending the holiday season in exotic locales like the Bahamas or Hawaii — anywhere warm, the Cedar Grove, New Jersey, resident said.

She finds it the perfect time to get away with her husband and son.

“It’s like everybody’s home with their family so we’ve got the whole beach to ourselves. It’s like our own little private paradise,” Leal said, adding that her mother sometimes gently teased her about going away instead of visiting her for the holidays.

For many, going home for Thanksgiving or Christmas is the ultimate obligation vacation, or the “oblication,” a term the Urban Dictionary grimly defines as “Taking time off work to go somewhere you don’t want to go to do something thoroughly unenjoyable, i.e. attending a funeral or holidays with in-laws.”

More than half the people who use vacation time to visit family resent doing so to some degree, according to a new poll by Travelocity.

“People have different feelings about it. Some people are very excited to go home for the holidays, some people would prefer to take their time off to take a vacation,” said Genevieve Shaw Brown, senior editor at Travelocity.

Hotel bargains

You may love your family, but if you’re yearning to escape the annual ritual of eating turkey with relatives you barely know or spending Christmas elbowing for room with other houseguests, lots of bargains and tempting destinations await.

“My favorites during Thanksgiving are to go to places in the Caribbean because the Caribbean, even during Thanksgiving, is off, off, off season,” said consumer adviser and HLN money expert Clark Howard.

“At Christmastime through New Year’s, it’s a different drill. The best deals are to Europe, starting on Christmas Day. If you can wait and go on Christmas Day or later, you’re going to get fantastic bargains to Europe.”

Travelers often focus on airfares as the barometer of whether to splurge on a vacation, but the big bargain story this year may be hotel prices, especially in big cities or convention destinations decimated by the bad economy.

It will cost 16 percent less on average to book a room during Thanksgiving compared to this time last year, Brown said. The prices are even lower in cities like San Diego, California; Miami, Florida; and San Juan, Puerto Rico, she added.

“The hotel business is in the toilet. It’s almost a depression,” Howard said. “You want to be really depressed as a hotel owner? Try during the holidays, because except for the hotels that are located at resorts, ski mountains, or the beach — wow, there is absolutely not business at all.”

The trick is to book a room anywhere but at those most in-demand locations, so check out hotels around the airport or the center of a big metropolis.

This may be your perfect opportunity to explore Washington, New York or San Francisco, California, during the period from Christmas to New Year’s, Howard said.