People We Meet on Vacation (2026) Movie Review: A Destination Trip Across Familiar Rom-Com Tropes

For all of its shameless adherence to virtually every existing trope of its genre—particularly those bred and propagated by its ever-anonymous Netflix kin—“People We Meet on Vacation” does, to its credit, take one bold creative swing right out of the gate. The film—directed by Brett Haley and based on a popular novel by Emily Henry—proposes a central character whose employment is literally being paid to go on a series of all-expenses-paid destination trips and write about them… and then asks us to have even a modicum of sympathy for her woes.

Of course, even in today’s world of increasing unaffordability—where jobs are being replaced left and right by AI and the prospect of a house in the future of any youth without generational wealth is about as plausible as an encounter with the Loch Ness Monster—those twenty-somethings who live alone in their New York apartments can feel crippling loneliness, too, without someone to share those few moments when they deign to appear on home turf between European resort getaways. But in truth, “People We Meet” is cognizant of the economic dissonance its premise creates, and does its best to confront it quickly before moving on to the more pressing(?) affairs of the heart.

From the very start, Poppy (a perpetually chipper Emily Bader) is directly reminded by her accommodating boss that she’s in an immeasurably privileged position that others would kill for, which is made all the more damning by Poppy’s current writing funk. The trips have simply lost their inspirational sauce, and much of this is due to the not-so-distant sourness left in her mouth by the friendship with her favourite vacation buddy that dissolved before her eyes.

That buddy is Alex (Tom Blyth), a tall drink of totally-not-at-all-British water whose first tumultuous encounter with the overbearing Emily—she’s talkative and sloppy, he’s quiet and neat!—belies a budding platonic union that quickly evolves into a yearly getaway excursion between the two. No matter where they were in their lives, they would drop everything once every summer to spend a week on some distant getaway.

Two years have passed since they’ve last spoken, though, and the reason for Poppy and Alex’s hard break is doled out in bits and pieces across the film’s nonlinear storyline, as “People We Meet” bounces back and forth between the various exploits of their time together and the impending awkwardness of their defining encounter at Alex’s brother’s destination wedding in Barcelona.

This structural choice, lifted from Henry’s novel, does at least give Haley’s film an inherent leg-up on the most obvious of its influences, and one that the film doesn’t even remotely try to hide. If the prospect of a romantic comedy unraveling the platonic union between two unlikely friends as they grow to develop stronger feelings doesn’t already sound familiar to you, then perhaps some bells will go off when their first encounter comes from a setup by a mutual friend who suggests they both carpool from college together towards the same eventual destination.

Yes, those of us who’ve seen “When Harry Met Sally…” even once will have a difficult time buying into this premise as anything more than a gender-swapped (insofar as who is the annoying one with commitment issues) “homage” that would give the likes of Quentin Tarantino pause, but that structural back-and-forth does at least give Haley a built-in sense of flow to chip away at this couple’s dynamic one trip at a time. Modern-day Poppy will mention a trip to Norway, and suddenly, we’ve backtracked four summers ago to the relevant piece of friendship fodder.

This choice also, in a way, gives the film a sense of hokey contrivance at the same time that it provides its only distinctive stylistic choice, as Haley’s grasp of will-they-won’t-they romantic tension hardly reaches the palpability of the late great Rob Reiner, nor is it helped by the film’s indistinct, car-commercial-ready view of its many locales. At the risk of merely copy-pasting the requisite “Netflix films all have an indistinct, lifeless gloss” paragraph that appears in all relevant reviews, it certainly doesn’t feel any less necessary to point out in a genre that the streaming giant seems to have strong-armed audiences into completely abandoning outside the doldrums of an endless suggestions tab on their Fire TV Stick.

Blyth and Bader carry this modest effort along with about as much romantic chemistry as they can muster, which is to say that they both exhibit the same stiff clumsiness that almost works in the face of their continuous, futile efforts to remain platonic amid the competing, on-again-off-again relationships they have every other week of the year. When the time comes for Haley to rely on nonverbal signals to sell this tumultuous dynamic, the young stars prove surprisingly game, if not entirely swept away in the supposed magnitude of a partnership where they’re basically fighting to keep their pants on.

Naturally, those tuning in to watch “People We Meet on Vacation” will hardly be doing so for meticulous displays of rom-com auteurism, and what they’ll be left with otherwise is a benign production that sincerely recreates just about every dopey romantic scenario it can imagine—skinny dipping gone wrong, an unexpected motel stay, an inappropriate conversation where two characters don’t realize they’re talking about different things, a kiss under heavy rain—as well as one or two new ones (anti-Julian propaganda? Gee, just what I’ve always wanted!).

You’re unlikely to stumble upon anything here hotter and steamier than a hot dog, or funnier than a cordial outing for your friend’s open mic night, but there are certainly worse people to meet on vacation, and worse films to meet in the streaming queue.

Read More: The 45 Best Netflix Original Movies, Ranked

People We Meet on Vacation (2026) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia, Letterboxd
People We Meet on Vacation (2026) Movie Cast: Emily Bader, Tom Blyth, Lukas Gage, Jameela Jamil, Alan Ruck, Molly Shannon
People We Meet on Vacation (2026) Movie Runtime: 1h 57m, Genre: Romance/Comedy

Where to watch People We Meet on Vacation