Holidays workers should book off in 2024 to get 56 days off and cheat the system
Travelling is often touted as one of the most fulfilling things you can do, assuming of course that you can afford it and find the time.
But if you are among those who are able to travel, then there is a way that you can use your annual leave to get a pretty insane amount of time off - so read closely.
And the dates you need to take begin more or less straightaway - so if you want to take advantage you'll have to be very quick.
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In order for this scheme to work, you'll need 29 days of annual leave available, and get the weekends and UK bank holidays off as well.
But even if you can't do the whole thing, you can still use your time off strategically to make sure you get more - so listen up.
So just how do you do it?
The first chunk to book off would be 2 - 5 January, sandwiched between the bank holiday of New Year's Day and the weekend - so taking four days off allows you to dodge the drudgery of the first week in January.
February is fortunately the briefest month of the year and you'll want to avoid taking time off then in order to take advantage of Easter.
If you take 25 - 28 March on holiday, you'll get Good Friday and Easter Monday taking four days to eight, and you can stretch it to two weeks by also taking 2 - 5 April.
Spending another four days of holiday between 7 - 10 May lets you bolster it with the first bank holiday of the month, while doing the same from 28 - 31 of the same month will use the other day off.
From there, it's a bit of a wait and the fun times are largely over as far as bank holidays are concerned.
If you take 27 - 30 August off you'll get the benefit of good weather and the summer bank holiday padding out your days.
From there it's a long, windy and rainy slog until the festive season, but if you book off the 23rd, 24th, 27th, 30th and 31st December then you can leave work a week and a half before the end of the year and not return until it's 2025.
Again, to do all of this involves booking off 29 days in total, so some of us are already not going to be able to take advantage of this.
There's also some creative counting involved, since if you can book off all 29 days then the bank holidays and adjacent weekends, you can bolt onto your time off takes the total to 56.
Sorry guys, we can't magically teach you a trick that doubles your days off otherwise we'd be using it too.
A TikToker tried to claim that you could do this and get 69 days but the numbers didn't quite add up there.
Plus lots of commenters simply posted things like 'laughs in retail' and 'laughs in hospitality', because plenty of us aren't guaranteed weekends and bank holidays off.
Even if you've got far fewer days to take off it's always handy to know when in the year you could stretch them a little bit further.
Kit Roberts