***This review contains mild spoilers.***

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry is one of my favorite books. I’ve read it twice and plan to read it again. So I was beyond excited for the film adaptation, literally had trouble sleeping the night before its release like a kid on Christmas Eve. I knew my expectations were impossibly high and I needed to level set them, but still, I couldn’t help being disappointed.

There was so much about book Poppy’s and Alex’s lives that was absent from the film. Like Alex being withdrawn and uptight has a lot do with his mom dying when he was a kid. His dad was largely checked out after that, and Alex felt like he had to step up to help care for his brothers. This also makes him reluctant to get romantically involved with someone he cares about as much as Poppy, because he feels like his mom’s death destroyed his father and he’s afraid of going through that too.  

And the reason Poppy has such intense wanderlust and is afraid to settle down—in particular in her hometown of Linfield, Ohio—is because she was teased and bullied throughout high school. She was made fun of for being “porny Poppy”—which the movie does, briefly, bring up—but also for the loud way she dressed and her eccentric parents, who were borderline hoarders. When she brings a boyfriend home, she’s devastated when he ridicules her family. It makes her afraid to be completely vulnerable and open up her whole life to someone else, believing no one will ever fully accept her.

I would’ve loved to see both of their families in the movie more, and especially to see Poppy and Alex with each other’s families. But I understand that you can’t fit everything into movies with tight runtimes, and these types of nuanced emotional backstories are difficult to transcribe to film.

I was also disappointed in the changes to Poppy and Alex’s falling out. In the book, they actually go on one more solo vacation together after the awkward couples trip to Tuscany. Now single, they travel to Croatia, their friendship a bit shaky as their repressed feelings for another bubble closer and closer to the surface. One night they’re hanging out in the hotel room and end up making out. After, their insecurity about what it means to the other person drives a wedge between them. In the movie, this kiss never happens. There’s only an almost kiss, which is far less impactful and their subsequent falling out makes less sense.

What bother me the most was that pretty much the entire present-day timeline was changed. In the book, Alex’s brother gets married in Palm Springs. Desperate to go and repair her relationship with Alex, Poppy pitches a Palm Springs story to her magazine editor. When her editor passes, Poppy instead takes time off work but lies to Alex to lure him on vacation with her again before his brother’s wedding.

She tells him she’s writing a piece for work about budget travel (because she can’t personally afford the luxurious accommodations her company normally pays for). They end up staying in a cramped, overheated motel room with a single bed (despite being advertised as having two). Alex sleeps on a tiny chaise that causes his back issues to flare up and keeps them trapped in the ridiculously hot room for far too long.

While the back issues briefly come up in the movie, they don’t make as much as sense without the horrible sleeping arrangements. The broken air conditioner also comes up, but it doesn’t have the same effect, since Poppy’s room in the movie is huge and airy and Alex isn’t even planning to stay with her.

In the book, Poppy rents a cheap car that’s on its last legs and the two drive to disappointing tourist attractions around the city, with the awkwardness of their damaged friendship looming over them the whole time. Their thrown one curveball after another and the trip is a disaster. It acts as a pressure cooker, making Poppy and Alex more and more uncomfortable until they burst, finally confronting their issues. It was so perfect and my favorite thing about the book.

I desperately wish this nightmare budget vacation was in the movie. Even if they couldn’t do Palm Springs, I wish they’d picked another city where Poppy could’ve planned a crappy trip on shoestring budget.

I also have to say that I never quite felt the connection between Poppy and Alex in the movie. Their relationship felt a little underdeveloped. I think the backstory omissions and the changes to the present-day storyline contributed to this. Also the fact their vacations were drastically cut down from the book. Maybe the movie needed a few montages to show more trips and Alex and Poppy getting closer and closer over the years.

Despite my many criticisms (some which I didn’t even bother getting into here), I didn’t hate the movie. There were many moments I enjoyed and that even made me laugh. My favorite probably being when Poppy impulsively buys a ridiculously heavy wooden sculpture at an artisan craft fair, which she and Alex (mostly Alex) then have to lug throughout the Canadian wilderness. I also thought the performances were good overall, and that Emily Bader and Tom Blyth were well cast as Poppy and Alex.

I did try to divorce the movie from the book and see it as its own piece of art. Even so, I think the movie was middling at best. It lacked the emotional depth and potent chemistry I want from a good romance. It also had a few too many cheap, cliched jokes that I’ve seen in countless other romcoms. I just don’t find a grown man running naked around the woods all that funny.

Overall rating: 3 out of 5⭐.