This idea might sound like a gimmick, dreamt up by a competitive travel agent as a creative way to sell holidays to the shrinking pool of people who can still afford to go on breaks abroad, but according to Expedia , Surprise Trips is actually a direct response to market research. Apparently, “a quarter of people who book their holiday months in advance, say the excitement of travel gets lost due to an overload of information available online,” and “81% of travellers admit to enjoying being surprised.”Despite some cynicism, I liked the idea at first; I thought it sounded fun, so I invited the guy I was seeing, and he was enthusiastic too. Wondering about where we were going was exciting, as was the idea of having to improvise and figure out what to do when we got there. But then again, we didn’t have a lot to lose as we weren’t actually paying for the trip – this was just a test. I’m not sure that I can relate to having such bad information-overload that I would actually choose to pay a travel agent to withhold the name of my destination until the day of my holiday. I mean, of 77 possible destinations , you can only veto three, but there were definitely more than three places I really didn’t want to go to (Luxembourg!), or worse, had been to before.If I was on the fence about my Surprise Holiday, soon a personal disaster dampened my enthusiasm for the whole thing: I found out that the guy I was going to take with me had cheated on me with his ex-girlfriend. And his name was already on the ticket. Shit. I asked Expedia if I could take someone else instead, but they said it wasn’t possible to make changes to the booking. This seems like a bit of a flaw to me, as people have to drop out of holidays all the time, not just because they turn out to be a dickhead, but also because they get sick, or something comes up at work or in their personal life. If you don’t know the destination, you don’t have the ability to argue with Easyjet about name changes, or book a different mate a last minute ticket.Instead of changing the name, Expedia tried to placate me by sending over the weather forecast for where I was going. It backfired: I did a bit of cheating, and used the weather and the departure time and airport to work out that I was probably going to Geneva — a city I feared was so expensive (especially with post-Brexit vote exchange rates) I wouldn’t even be able to afford to get drunk in a half-decent place. By the time I left for the airport at 7am on a Saturday morning, I was tending towards agreeing with Mel: this was the worst idea ever.