You are on a beach in Portugal, 3 drinks in, and the person beside you at the bar has been making you laugh for the last 40 minutes. You know nothing about their commute, their Tuesday evenings, or how they behave when the Wi-Fi goes down. And that, oddly enough, is the entire appeal. Holiday romances carry a reputation for being short, silly, and destined to fizzle the moment you collect your luggage at arrivals. But the data on them tells a more complicated story than most people expect, and the psychology behind why they happen in the first place is worth taking seriously.
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A UK survey of 2,000 adults, conducted by OnePoll and reported in The Scotsman, found that 73% of people who had a holiday fling stayed in touch with that person after coming home. Staying in touch, of course, is not the same thing as building a lasting relationship. Saga UK research puts the failure rate of holiday romances at 93%, which leaves only about 7% that progress into something serious. So the honest answer to the question in the title is: yes, but rarely.
The more interesting question is why they start at all, and what separates the ones that survive from the rest.
Why Holidays Make People More Open to Romance
Routine has a numbing effect on people. Work schedules, household admin, social obligations, and the general repetition of daily life leave very little room for the kind of openness that a new relationship requires. Holidays strip all of that away. You have nowhere to be, no alarm set, no one expecting a report from you by Friday.
The same OnePoll survey found the top reasons people gave for enjoying a holiday romance were living in the moment (35%), feeling excited (31%), and being spontaneous (30%). Beach breaks ranked as the preferred setting, with 32% of respondents saying they felt more attractive with a tan and 28% saying they felt more confident.
Confidence and attractiveness feed into each other. When you feel good about how you look, you are more likely to approach someone, hold eye contact, or say yes to a conversation that would otherwise feel like a stretch. A week in the sun does that for a lot of people.
Where People Actually Meet on Holiday
Resort socials, group tours and dating platforms all function as starting points for holiday connections. People abroad tend to match with others staying nearby through mainstream apps or niche services like sugar daddy apps, and shared itineraries or hotel bars do the rest. The method of meeting matters less than the setting itself.
What counts is that holidays remove routine. A 2,000-person UK poll by OnePoll found 30 per cent credited spontaneity as the main driver behind a holiday romance, and 28 per cent said they simply felt more confident while away from home..
The Psychology Behind Falling for Someone on Holiday
Arthur and Elaine Aron developed something called self-expansion theory, which looks at how romantic relationships influence a person’s sense of self. The basic idea is that people are drawn to partners who broaden what they know, feel, and do. Someone you meet while kayaking in Croatia or wandering around a night market in Marrakech is already associated with novelty, and that association is powerful.
Peer-reviewed research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, from Aron and colleagues in 2000, confirmed that couples who participated in novel and arousing activities together showed greater increases in relationship quality. A more recent paper by Emery, published in 2025 in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, supports the same finding: shared exciting activities correlate with relationship satisfaction.
Holidays are, by default, full of novel and arousing activities. That is not a coincidence. The connection between new environments and romantic interest has a strong foundation in the research.
What Happens When You Get Home
This is where the 93% failure rate comes in. Two people who met under ideal conditions, with no responsibilities, plenty of sunlight, and unlimited free time, suddenly return to a life full of all the things they were escaping. Long-distance logistics add another layer of difficulty, especially if the 2 people live in different countries.
The U.S. Travel Association, working with Edge Research in 2012, found that couples who travel together report higher satisfaction in their relationships, better communication, more romance, and a better sex life. But that data is about established couples, not new ones. The gap between travelling with someone you already love and trying to build a new relationship after a holiday is enormous.
The 7% who make it tend to have a few things working in their favour: geographic proximity, a willingness to put in effort after the holiday ends, and realistic expectations about what comes next. Staying in touch is easy. Transitioning from holiday mode to real life, together, is where most of these connections fall apart.
So, Should You Take a Holiday Romance Seriously?
There is no reason to dismiss one outright. The feelings are real, even if the conditions that produced them are temporary. What matters is recognising the difference between a connection that was amplified by circumstance and one that has something underneath it strong enough to survive a Tuesday in February.
If you meet someone on holiday and feel something genuine, stay in touch. Make plans to see each other in ordinary settings. Find out how you get along when neither of you is relaxed, tanned, and free of obligations. The 7% who make it through are proof that it can work. The 93% are proof that it usually does not, and there is nothing wrong with that either.
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