Suzanne Harrington: Gen Z travel differently from Gen X - not for them fleapits and bedbugs

Suzanne Harrington. Pic: Andrew Hasson

The only thing I have in common with Madonna is a daughter called Lola. She has one, I have one.

When hers moved out to go to university a few years ago, she told an interviewer how she “cried every night for weeks. I would go in her bedroom and lay on her bed and cry, it was terrible.”

She said it was her “first heartbreak”.

Mine moved out yesterday. To Australia.

I haven’t had a chance to be heartbroken, because I’m still doing left-behind laundry and hoovering up decades of dust bunnies — dust yetis — from under her bed. Cancelling the XL veg box for a small one, counselling the dog.

Shoehorning stuff into the attic, in case at some stage in the future she may need her primary school artwork back, or her odd sock collection.

We watched our final Bake Off final together the night before she left, her booking Bangkok Airbnbs on her phone as the three finalists piped their choux.

It was a perfect ending, after a month of back-to-back leaving dos and 23 years of sharing a fridge.

Is it wrong to be delighted when your kids move out? Not so much delighted for yourself — although less mess and more space is nice — but delighted for them.

I am delighted that this is the year both my kids took flight. Literally.

They are both now thousands of miles away, having adventures, packing their heads with experiences, and learning how to live far away from their familiar people and places.

Rich kids do this as a matter of course — the infamous Gap Yah — but for the non-rich, it takes more effort, more focus, more graft.

They have to want to.

And it will change them, from realising that there is no such thing as the loo roll fairy to navigating all the trickier obstacles.

In a final act of parenting, I get them both travel insurance as a leaving gift.

Because Gen Z travel differently from Gen X.

Not for them fleapits and bedbugs, hostels and hellholes, the rocking up in unknown places armed with nothing more than a dogeared Lonely Planet and a lone malaria pill you forgot to take.

No. These guys are organised. Pre-booked. Trust Pilot and Trip Advisor, ratings reviewed and virtual tours already made — nothing left to chance.

Is this better or worse, or just different, from the analogue days of making it up as you went along?

Personally, I’m loving that I’ll be getting digital updates from every airport lounge, every Airbnb, every Insta backdrop from Tasmania to Timbuctoo.

This period of readjustment feels more soothing than the olden days, where a three-month-old postcard might eventually flop through the letterbox, rather than the daily ping of WhatsApp updates; it remains a digital umbilical cord.

Unless they end up somewhere there is no wifi — a move as inconceivable to Gen Z as the concept of travel insurance to Gen X — it seems unlikely this cord will ever be severed.

They’ve gone, but they take us with them.