What do they normally do when they go? And where do they go?

I personally love all the destinations. I use them as a literal honeymoon for my newlyweds to just spend quality alone time together, go on adventures together and just enjoy being newlywed. They practice the foreign skills, chat with locals and more. :D

I also do so when EVERYBODY in my household rolls the wish (Doesn't count for a single sim living in a house) to go to the SAME destination.

I also like doing Family-Vacations at least once. Everybody goes, the parents normally spend their times taking pictures while the kids play with the local children. The teens I normally put on adventures or make some romance happen.

Usually only when I'm playing an adventurer Sim, or I want some decorations for the house or something. I've used them as honeymoon and family vacation destinations a few times, but it's not something I do often.

I sent my current couple on a faux honeymoon to Paris but find it's hard to vacation when the purpose of the destinations is for adventures! They did some nectar tasting and visited the market, but that was about it really.

That was the first time I'd sent any sims on vacation in a long time.

I like writing a lot, so sometimes I make characters from my books into sims. Recently I had my team of teen "superheroes" go exploring caves in China. Once they got home, I made them train martial arts and pretend they were fighting bad guys (which I also made) and I built a custom tomb in their basement. And that's what I do ALL summer. (Joking. About the summer thing... xD)

Never! It's too risky and they don't like foreign food .. jk! I don't bother with the travel. The last time I did send a sim, he was nagging me to death to send him to France ...he'd been there all of ohhhhh ten mins? and promptly rolled the wish to come home! Ungrateful swine!

Last sim I played (Doug Bones archeologist) every three sims days he was off on another adventure, he skilled up, went on adventures befriended locals then the WA had a hissy fit anbd changed his name to Doug Kamel and he had two kids one on egypt the other in china. The game then became completely unplayable so he is gone are as all my sims and lovely buildings as I had to uninstall now waiting 14 hours (112kbps) to redownload the basegame which I stupidly bought from the EA store. I blame chris steel naturally (joke).
Anyway rant over, two weeks ago my answer to this question would have been never too much bother but I had a sim desperate to get in to nectar making so I send her to france and really enjoyed the change of pace she completely ignored the quests though it didn't fit with her character. There is a lot more to WA than it first appears I dismissed it early on as a waste of time but now I really like it (I wanna play it generations or the patch better not have broken it completely)

I dont which destination is my favourite although the sphinx in Egypt is awesome my sim got cursed after being beat up by a mummy so I sent him to plead with the sphinx it was the first time I saw the animation it was as I previously mentioned awesome. I like the different skills each area introduced I would really love to master the photography skill but that is currently broken/borked so my favoutite would have to be the martial arts skill. I love breaking space rocks and seeing what gems I come across although it does seem to be a little addictive for my sims, if there is no sprinkler on the lot and they know martial arts they are straight over that board whenever they have a free moment.
I have never tried a family vacation not sure whether or not I would bother with that.

Less and less lately. My sims can't even be trusted to not lose souvenirs in the family inventory on their way back home. So they are just throwing money away.

I love WA. The adventure part is fun, but playing without adventuring is also very much enjoyable. I've modified Egypt and France quite heavily, to make it possible to enjoy vacationing without adventures. I've added hotels, clubs, bars, cafés hang out places, cinema's, spa's and pretty much anything I've come up with into both Egypt and France. Most of these places I've not even tested yet, so I still have a lot of "new" stuff to explore when travelling. The only spot I've not modified is China.

My current hood is very tiny, a small village, and currently they don't even have a pub because nobody has been interested in having a pub, and, it's very unlikely that there will ever be a disco in the hood, so going clubbing, is quite an exotic happening, and currently, it can only be done abroad.

There are very good made-over French lots in Sims 3 Musketeers. And I've replaced all my French buildings with the ones you can get from there. For reality's sake, I have hotels for all income levels, for example the original Nectary is now a hotel/spa for the rich and famous, and my poor Sims have no place visiting it. For them there is a cheap hotel in the centre and I've changed the café to be a nectary, and added a nectar registry in there so they can fulfil their deepest nectary visiting wants without having to travel so much.

WA is also a very good EP for career opportunities.

What comes to adventuring, I loved adventuring, but it's quite repetitive. But then again, so is travelling, which is why my Sims don't always travel when they get the want. My current hood is 4 months old, and currently I've only travelled with two families. One writer lady who visited Egypt and spent time writing her second book in there, and one father/son combo who visited France to fish. The father/son combo will also be visiting China very soon, the dad to fish, the son to learn martial arts. And I have one girl who wants to be rich, so she'll be visiting France in the hopes of finding herself a rich husband.

Because adventure buildings don't reset after using them, my Sims are not allowed to do adventures. If somebody really wants to be an adventure Sim, then I'll move them to another hood, which is also an adventure because hoods in TS3 are <3 and there are a lot of custom hoods I want to try out, and currently this is the only way to do it. Unfortunately, nobody as yet wants to be an adventure person.

Collecting is the same thing, collecting in the main hood is forbidden, because it's a tiny hood and I know all the collection spots, so any collecting, needs to be done abroad where it's more challenging.

And, lets not forget archaeology. The digging sites are a win, and I'm really hoping to be able to get an archaeology Sim who's income would come solely from dig sites. No adventuring, just digging.

EA should have definitely made WA more touristy in the first place, so there would have been more to do when you don't go adventuring. Now a lot of people seem to forget that the best part of the Sims series is it's flexibility to be what ever you want it to be, and get stuck in the WA == Adventuring and nothing more rut. But I do give EA credit on spending time on the hoods themselves. The scenery is stunning and even the buildings have had time spent on them. Not like BV where the buildings were ugly boxes with crappy design and ugly furnishing, and clearly done by people who don't enjoy building.