Just six weeks into their romance, 28-year-old Mandy Gresh and her boyfriend decided to take a mini-vacation to Quebec City. She bought airline tickets and reserved a hotel room for the weekend.
Then it hit her: They'd be together four straight days. What if they got in a fight? What if a really annoying personality quirk emerged?
What if they broke up before they even left?
"I was like, 'Oh my god, the trip is as far away as we've been dating,' " Gresh said. "Hopefully nothing goes wrong in the next month because we're both going to be out a lot of money!"
Despite a missed flight, cold weather and her admittedly annoying, compulsive search for the cheapest airfares, the duo found they were compatible. By the vacation's end, their relationship had passed a major test: the holidate.
Long gone are the days when a young couple's first trip together was the voyage home to meet the parents. Lured by the ease of Internet travel planning, couples are jetting off to the beach, piling camping gear into the car and putting their relationships to the early test.
The hotel and tourism industries are starting to take note. Fairmont, a luxury chain of 55 hotels worldwide, has begun offering packages designed for new couples, including "icebreaker" specials that pair romantic dinners with more adventurous outings. The Ritz Carlton Orlando Grande Lakes suggests Orlando, Fla., as a "great destination to be the first mark on your love story map," packaging a lake-view room with tickets to Discovery Cove, an upscale water park.
"We think we've got something here that's satisfying a need," said Brian Richardson, Fairmont's vice president of brand marketing and communication. "I'm not going to suggest it fell out of any profound, deep scientific research. . . . There was just evidence to suggest that couples fairly new in a relationship are increasingly interested in traveling together, doing interesting things together and wanting to make an impression."
To test its hunch, Fairmont partnered with Lavalife, a Canada-based online dating site, to survey whether people in new relationships would consider traveling with their partner -- and how soon they'd be comfortable heading out of town. Of more than 5,500 people who answered the poll, 50% of men and 41% of women said they would take a trip within the first two months of dating.
