Your Smartwatch Numbers on Holiday: What Will Your Holiday Really Do to Your Steps and Calories?

There are plenty of things people check on their smartwatch during a normal week. How many steps have I done? How many calories have I burned? How long did I sleep? Did I hit my activity target? But take that same smartwatch on holiday and the numbers can look very different.

A holiday can completely change your normal routine. You might spend a week walking around a theme park, exploring a European city, hiking through the mountains or doing very little beyond walking between your sun lounger and the pool. Your calorie intake can change just as dramatically, with restaurant meals, ice cream, cocktails, enormous breakfasts and snacks becoming part of the daily routine.

So what can you actually expect your smartwatch to tell you on different types of holiday?

It is worth remembering that smartwatch calorie estimates are exactly that: estimates. They use information such as your heart rate, movement, body measurements and activity patterns to calculate energy expenditure, but they cannot measure your calorie burn perfectly. The same is true of step counts, particularly when you’re pushing a buggy, carrying shopping or doing activities where your arms aren’t moving normally.

Nevertheless, the numbers can give you a fascinating insight into just how active different holidays really are.

The Florida Theme Park Holiday

If you’ve ever spent a full day at Walt Disney World or Universal Orlando, you’ll probably already have a feeling that your smartwatch is going to have something to say about it.

A Florida holiday can be surprisingly active. A typical theme park day might involve somewhere around 15,000 to 25,000 steps, although particularly enthusiastic walkers can go considerably higher. Even if you aren’t consciously exercising, you’re constantly moving between attractions, walking through queues, exploring different areas of the park, heading to restaurants and making your way back to the car or hotel at the end of the day.

A 20,000-step day could easily mean walking around 9 to 10 miles depending on your stride length. For a larger adult, that amount of walking could represent several hundred additional calories burned compared with a largely sedentary day. The exact figure will vary enormously, but something in the region of 600 to 1,000 calories of activity-related expenditure across a very active theme park day is entirely plausible for some adults.

And then comes the interesting part: the calorie intake.

A theme park day can also involve burgers, fries, pizza, snacks, ice cream, doughnuts, soft drinks and the occasional giant bucket of something you absolutely did not need but somehow ended up buying. Add breakfast before leaving the hotel and dinner afterwards, and it is very easy for a holiday day to contain significantly more calories than a normal working day.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to gain weight every day. Your smartwatch may reveal that you’re also burning substantially more energy than you normally would. A Florida holiday can therefore create a rather unusual combination of eating considerably more while also being considerably more active.

The Beach Holiday

The classic beach holiday sits almost at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Imagine a day involving breakfast at the hotel, a short walk to the beach, several hours on a sun lounger, a swim in the sea, lunch, another swim, a walk for an ice cream and an evening meal followed by drinks. Your smartwatch might not be particularly impressed.

You could easily find yourself doing only 5,000 to 8,000 steps on a genuinely lazy beach day. If you’re staying somewhere where everything is close by and spending most of the day sitting or lying down, your active calorie number could be surprisingly low.

However, there is a big difference between a pure relaxation beach holiday and one where you’re actually making use of the water. Swimming, paddleboarding, snorkelling and watersports can significantly increase energy expenditure. Recreational swimming, for example, is classed as a moderate-to-vigorous activity in the Compendium of Physical Activities, while activities such as kayaking and water sports can be considerably more demanding.

So your beach holiday could produce anything from a relatively sedentary 5,000-step day to a much more active 15,000-step day if you’re swimming, walking along the coast and exploring rather than spending the entire afternoon horizontal.

The biggest variable might actually be what you’re eating and drinking. A few cocktails beside the pool, a large lunch and a three-course evening meal can add up quickly, meaning a relaxing beach holiday may produce a much smaller calorie deficit, or a larger calorie surplus, than you might expect from simply being somewhere warm and sunny.

The City Break

City breaks are where smartwatches can suddenly become very impressive.

If you’re spending three or four days exploring somewhere like Rome, Barcelona, New York or Paris, you might barely think about exercise at all. Yet your watch could be recording 15,000, 20,000 or even 25,000 steps every day.

That’s because sightseeing is essentially walking disguised as tourism.

You’re walking from the hotel to breakfast, from breakfast to a museum, from the museum to a landmark, across a square, down a shopping street, through a train station and then across town for dinner. You might take public transport for some journeys, but the amount of walking between destinations can quickly add up.

The Compendium of Physical Activities specifically includes touring or travelling involving walking as a recognised physical activity, while moderate walking typically requires substantially more energy than simply sitting or standing.

For a reasonably active city break, 12,000 to 20,000 steps per day is a realistic sort of range, with 20,000-plus entirely possible if you’re determined to see everything.

Calories can be interesting too. Walking speed, hills, stairs and the amount of time spent on your feet all make a difference. Someone walking briskly around a hilly city for several hours can burn considerably more energy than someone spending most of the day on public transport and sitting in cafés.

The irony is that city breaks can also involve some serious eating. Pastries for breakfast, pizza for lunch, gelato in the afternoon and a large Italian dinner can quite easily offset some of the calories burned while exploring.

Still, if your smartwatch shows you’ve walked 18,000 steps before dinner, you’ve definitely earned that gelato.

The Skiing Holiday

A skiing holiday might look like one of the most physically demanding types of holiday, and your smartwatch will generally agree.

Downhill skiing is a fairly intensive activity, and the 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities assigns general skiing a MET value of 7.0, reflecting its relatively high energy cost compared with resting.

But the numbers can be deceptive because you aren’t actually skiing continuously for eight hours.

There are chairlifts, queues, lunch breaks, time spent in ski school, stopping to admire the view and the inevitable occasions where someone has lost a glove. A skier might therefore record somewhere around 8,000 to 15,000 steps in a day while still accumulating a substantial amount of activity.

The calorie expenditure can be impressive, particularly for someone skiing hard for several hours. Depending on body weight, skiing ability and how much time is actually spent moving, several hundred additional calories burned through activity during a day is quite possible.

Then there’s the après-ski problem.

After a day on the slopes, you’ve got a perfect excuse for hot chocolate, beer, wine, pizza, burgers and a large dinner. Skiing can therefore create a fascinating battle between high activity levels and equally high calorie intake.

The Walking or Hiking Holiday

If your idea of a holiday is putting on a pair of boots and disappearing into the countryside for the day, your smartwatch could be working overtime.

A hiking holiday can produce some of the highest step counts of any conventional holiday, particularly when you’re covering significant distances or dealing with hills. A day of 15,000 to 30,000 steps isn’t particularly unusual for someone walking for several hours.

The terrain makes a huge difference to calorie expenditure too. Walking uphill is considerably more demanding than walking along a flat pavement, and carrying a backpack adds another variable.

The Compendium puts cross-country hiking at around 6 METs, with uphill walking becoming more demanding depending on the gradient.

For someone spending most of the day hiking, an additional 700 to 1,500 calories of activity-related expenditure is possible depending on their size, speed, terrain and duration. That’s a very broad estimate rather than a target, but it illustrates just how different a hiking holiday can be from a week spent beside a pool.

The Foodie Holiday

Then there is the holiday where the primary activity is eating.

Food-focused trips, all-inclusive holidays and weekends built around restaurants might not produce spectacular step counts. You could easily find yourself somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 steps a day, depending on how much exploring you do between meals. But calorie intake can go in completely the opposite direction.

A large breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, substantial dinner and several drinks can push daily intake well beyond what someone might normally eat at home. And because restaurants don’t come with nutrition labels in the same way packaged food does, it can be surprisingly difficult to estimate exactly how many calories you’re consuming.

Your smartwatch may therefore show a perfectly respectable 8,000 steps and a substantial calorie burn, while your actual calorie intake has quietly increased by considerably more. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Holidays aren’t supposed to be an exercise challenge or a weight-loss programme. The point is simply that your smartwatch only tells one side of the story.

The Road Trip

Road trips are another interesting one because the activity level can vary wildly from day to day. One day might involve six hours behind the wheel and only 4,000 steps. The next could involve exploring a national park, walking around a small town, visiting attractions and finishing the day with 18,000 steps.

Florida road trips are a particularly good example. You could spend part of the day driving between destinations and then rack up thousands of steps exploring beaches, shopping outlets, attractions or towns along the way.

This is one reason looking at your average activity across an entire holiday can be more useful than obsessing over individual days. A long driving day followed by a very active day isn’t necessarily a problem; it’s simply how that particular holiday works.

The All-Inclusive Holiday

Finally, there’s the holiday that your smartwatch might regard as a personal insult: the all-inclusive. Breakfast buffet. Pool. Lunch buffet. Pool. Snack. Drinks. Dinner buffet. More drinks. Repeat.

On a genuinely relaxed all-inclusive holiday, you might only record 4,000 to 7,000 steps a day, particularly if your room, pool, restaurants and beach are all within a few minutes of one another. Yet your calorie intake can be considerably higher than normal because food and drinks are available almost constantly.

Of course, you can completely change the numbers by choosing to walk around the resort, go swimming, play beach volleyball, use the gym or take part in activities. The same all-inclusive resort could produce 5,000 steps for one guest and 15,000 for another. And that’s really the most important thing your smartwatch numbers reveal about holidays.

There Isn’t Really a ‘Normal’ Holiday

One of the most interesting things about taking your smartwatch on holiday is seeing just how dramatically your activity can change without you deliberately exercising.

A Florida theme park holiday might mean 20,000 steps and hundreds of additional calories burned through walking. A city break might produce a similar number simply because you’re exploring on foot. A skiing or hiking holiday can push energy expenditure even higher because of the intensity and terrain. Meanwhile, a beach or all-inclusive holiday could see your daily steps fall dramatically. None of those numbers means that one type of holiday is better than another.

Sometimes the whole point of a holiday is to relax. Sometimes you want to come home exhausted because you’ve spent two weeks trying to see and do everything. And sometimes the perfect holiday is somewhere in between. Your smartwatch simply gives you an interesting window into what your body is actually doing while you’re away.

And perhaps the most revealing number isn’t your calorie burn at all. It’s the step count you see when you get home, realise you’ve spent two weeks walking everywhere, and wonder why your legs are still aching.