1 month ago
5
January 14, 2026 — 5:00am
If you hear the word “staycation” and immediately start panic-googling international flights, I understand. The COVID-19 pandemic might be almost five years in the past, but there are certain phrases that still strike fear into any traveller’s heart.
Press conference. Case numbers. Border closure. Gladys. Dan. Staycation.
Because what in the world of marketing hell was this – staycation? Stay at home and have a holiday? It’s just as good as the real thing! Or at least, that’s what we told ourselves during pandemic shutdowns, when there was nowhere else to go for a break but our own backyard.
That feeling has persisted. Check out your social media feeds and see where everyone is spending their holiday money right now: Japan, Bali, Europe and even South America on mine. Staycations are out of fashion.
But I’m here to tell you that you’re just not doing it right. I’m here to tell you that the budget holiday experience you have been hoping for, the great holiday you can knock out while barely even taking any annual leave, is a staycation.
It doesn’t matter where you live – you just have to focus on the right thing. A staycation shouldn’t be a catch-all holiday, a generic, broad experience. You’re having a holiday in your own city, or your own region. You already know it well, so there’s no need for box-ticking drudgery.
Staycation is not a dirty word. You just have to forget that we were once forced to do it.
A staycation done right should focus on a facet of culture or experience that you love, and that your city does well, and that you could dedicate yourself to entirely for two or three days or even longer and properly appreciate what you have on your doorstep. And enjoy it like a real holiday.
My partner and I just did this, and it was great. Genuinely pleasurable. Not just the kind of thing you have to tell yourself you’re enjoying because you have no other option.
Our focus for this stay-at-home holiday was an easy one: food. We love food. We love to eat. We also live just outside Sydney, raising two young kids, and don’t get to spend nearly as much time as we would like enjoying the foodie attractions that the NSW capital has to offer.
So we booked in some grand-parental childcare assistance and planned three days of eating.
Next thing you have to do right for a successful staycation: go hard on accommodation. Spend as much money as you can, as much as you have in your budget and you see as reasonable, on a hotel. Because if there is any point on this staycation where you start to think to yourself, “We would be more comfortable just going back home tonight”, then you have failed.
We stayed at the Four Seasons in Circular Quay (admittedly, a perk of my job), and I have to tell you, there wasn’t a single second where we thought we would be better off at home. This is a classic luxury hotel and it’s spectacular, from the Opera House views from our room to the Executive Club Lounge breakfasts to the fine artworks adorning the walls.
This hotel is the fantasy, the sprawling harbourside mansion that you as a Sydney resident are forced to consider every time you catch a ferry, and for a few days it’s ours.
The Four Seasons is also a good place to kick off the fantasy eat-fest, because Grain Bar downstairs does a very good cocktail, and who doesn’t want to begin their deep-dive into the local dining scene with a cocktail?
We then jump in an Uber and head out to Double Bay for dinner at Margaret, Sydney legend Neil Perry’s two-hatted fine-diner.
I have to tell you, you don’t miss being anywhere else. You don’t wish you were in Europe or North America or even Adelaide or Hobart when you’re huddled into a booth at Margaret, drinking Riesling and eating fresh-caught coral trout and idly wondering if the kids are in bed yet. We never go to Double Bay in our normal lives, there’s no need. But it’s nice. It’s really nice.
Travel is freedom, which is why it really does feel like proper travel the next morning when we wake up some time past 6am and slowly wander up to the Club Lounge and stare at all the ferries and yachts over the rim of a flat white that someone else has made.
We’re having lunch today at Mode Kitchen & Bar, a mod-Oz restaurant in the hotel. Dinner tonight will flit from a Surry Hills wine bar (Poly, where we’re treated fairly dismissively), to a Surry Hills cocktail bar (The Rover, where we’re treated like old friends). We’ll have breakfast tomorrow in Thai Town, down near Central Station, where Boon Cafe does fiery bowls of Sukhothai noodles at 10am – the sort of thing we would never find in our neighbourhood.
This staycation barely scratches the surface of the local dining scene. There’s beachy fanciness out in the eastern suburbs, legit cuisines of the entire world out to the west, everything in between, all around us. You could repeat this same mini-break idea over and over again, in any city in Australia, and it would never get old.
It’s not the cheapest holiday if you want to do it right, but it’s also far more affordable than a regular mini-break when you consider that there are few transport costs – no airfares, no long-distance train tickets to worry about. It doesn’t cost you time in annual leave. It takes very little planning.
Because staycation is not a dirty word. You just have to forget that we were once forced to do it.
The writer stayed as a guest of the Four Seasons Hotel Sydney.
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