When we succeed in giving our chronic workaholic-ism the slip (Canadians Amongst World’s Most Vacation Deprived), Canadians are big travelers, and neither great Recessions nor fears of terrorism have dampened our collective urge for wandering the world. In the first quarter of this year, we broke our record for foreign holiday spending, blowing a cool $3 billion on overseas travel. Most recent data – for the month of April – shows that we’re taking more trips to both the U.S. and other foreign countries than in previous months.

Here’s a look at where we’ve come from – and where we’re going:

Foreign Affairs:

Excluding our “home and native land,” which is Canadians’ top travel destination, here’s how other countries rank according to our fondness and frequentation of them.

This Year’s Top 20 Hot Spots:

They may not all offer beaches or tropical temperatures, but based on online searches that track departures from Canadian airports, the following 20 destinations are the most sought after by travelers in 2010:

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All Work and No Play

Despite our reputation as a fairly laid-back, unstressed people, it might come as a surprise that close to 50 percent of all Canadians refer to themselves as “vacation deprived”?

While Canadians know we don’t have quite so good a deal as many Europeans with their endless public holidays and weeks of paid vacations, we tend to think we’re not quite as relentlessly work-obsessed as our obsessively work-a-holic neigbhors to the south. Wrong!

According to a recent survey carried out by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, Canadians actually receive (5) fewer paid vacation days than our work-driven pals to the south.

Even more shocking is that fact that out of 49 countries surveyed, Canada is practically at the bottom of the list in terms of vacation deprivation; only in Thailand (6 days) and the Phillipines (5 days) do citizens receive fewer vacation days than in Canada. Contrast that with the leading hedonists on the planet:  the fun-loving Finns – who enjoy a record 44 days of paid holidays every year.

But wait, it gets even worse. It turns out that instead of pleading with their bosses for more vacation time, a significant portion of Canadians are actually loathe to take the scant vacation days they’re eligible to receive.

A 2010 study by Expedia.ca/Harris-Decima discovered that, last year, a total of 36.5 million vacation days went unclaimed by Canadians. In other words, there are a whole lot of us who prefer to hole up in our cubicles than to hit the beach or ski slopes.

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