What’s A Hush Trip—And Can It Get You In Trouble With Your Boss?

16.05.2024 - 01:41 / forbes.com

Many travelers post photos and reels from their vacations, showing off the scenery from their beach getaways or their retreats into the mountains, giving tours of their hotel suites and hovering their iPhones over plates of local cuisine. But there may be a growing segment of travelers who are keeping quiet about their travels, at least in real time—and it has nothing to do with being humble or worrying about being burglarized while away from home. Rather, they don’t want their bosses to know they’re away because they never submitted a PTO request, a move that’s known as a “hush-cation” or a “hush trip.”

The idea? If you can work from anywhere, why not log your hours from a vacation destination and take Zoom calls with a real-life beach in the background, yet be covert enough to keep your laptop’s camera turned off so you don’t blow your cover?

A large portion of the workforce has gone remote: Nearly 13% of people working from home, and 28% working a hybrid model and new reports shows that return-to-office mandates could drive employees to quit. With summer vacations on the horizon, there’s a chance some of your remote colleagues (especially if they’re Gen Z) are secretly working from vacation locales. But could a hush-cation or a hush trip get you in trouble with your boss?

While some surveys have surfaced about hush cations, it remains to be seen as to whether it’s something remote workers just fascinate or if it’s something they actually do, much like the quiet quitting trend.

We talked with experts from human resources, therapy, and business leadership backgrounds about hush trips — whether these types of getaways have merit, what problems they could reveal about a workplace, and if they could be a fireable offenses. Here’s what experts have to say about hush-cations.

According to ResumeBuilder.com, a hush trip is where remote employees work from a vacation destination without telling their employers.

Last summer, the site surveyd 918 GenZers remote and hybrid workers and 44% revealed that they have taken a hush trip. About 65% used a virtual background to bamboozle their employers. The majority were able to get away with their trip without their bosses finding out and without getting in any hot water, despite the fact that one third of the hush trippers were just logging two hours a day.

Hotels are catching on, and some have even come up with clever marketing, like the “Hush Trip Haven” program at AC Hotel Clearwater Beach in Florida. The package comes with amenities and perks like a dedicated co-working space, a refreshment concierge, a special door hanger that says “Working ‘From Home’” and a webcam cover for privacy during virtual meetings.

Shelley Paxton, a business speaker and author of