Shock - horror - the Grumpy Traveller looks at a UK study that shows young people go on holiday to get drunk and have sex.

If you wish to know which guests to put on your blacklist, the Foreign Office in the UK has some advice.

The FO bureaucrats suggest that young holiday Britons between the ages of 16 and 30 are Men and Women Behaving Badly. In some cases, Very Badly.

As if we didn't know.

UK taxpayers forked out UKP50, 000 for this survey of the blindingly obvious. They could have saved themselves a heap of money by jumping on an EasyJet to Ibiza and spending a night at the Club Eden's Shower Party.

The survey – Project Holiday – found that more than a third of Britons aged between 16 and 30 believe that holidays are purely about hedonism.

In other words. they wanted a really good time to escape their bleak, boring lives working on the production line in a car factory in Dagenham.

Of those who wanted to escape Britain's dark, satanic mills, 71 percent said they wanted to drink to excess, 28 percent wanted a one-night stand, eight percent wanted to take drugs and five percent wanted a fight. The latter were probably Scots.

The Welsh were the least interested in sex – no surprise there - with just five percent rating it their top reason for heading overseas

Young travellers from South West England were actually interested in local culture, which must have been a challenge for tour operators more used to organising tours of bars in Benidorm or night clubs in Alicante.

Okay, the Aussies have been known to sink a few cans of Fosters and cause the odd ripple in Bali, but it appears that's nothing compared to what the Sangria-fuelled Brits get up to in Spain and other holiday hotspots.

Beware especially if you receive a booking from a young male who hails from the West Midlands of England. The study suggests that West Midlanders have become the modern-day equivalent of the "Vikings", causing mayhem around the globe.

Nearly 30 percent of them say they go on holiday seeking sex compared with a national figure in the UK of 15 percent.

While most young Brits are still getting their kicks in Europe, the arrival of low cost, long haul airlines could change all that.

So check the arrivals board at your local airport. If that aircraft is coming from Birmingham International, England, you may want to hang out the No Vacancies sign.



IAN JARRETT is based in Fremantle, Western Australia from where he travels frequently in Asia on assignments for travel magazines.

He is a member of the BamBoo Alliance, a group of leading travel writers in the region. He can be contacted at ianjarrett@mac.com