Travel news around the world: Danish Travel Agency Runs Ad Telling People To Go On Vacation, Have Sex And Boost The Country's Birthrate

Friday, 2 October 2015

Danish Travel Agency Runs Ad Telling People To Go On Vacation, Have Sex And Boost The Country's Birthrate

Take some time off work, go on vacation and have sex with your significant other -- because mom told you to.

On Tuesday, Danish travel agency Spies Rejser used a very real problem -- the country's aging population -- to urge people to book a trip.

The ad is a follow-up to the agency's "Do It For Denmark" spot, in which the travel company encouraged Danes to go abroad and conceive. But this time, instead of just asking Danes to go on holiday and help their country increase its birth rate, Spies Rejser is calling on their broody mothers to help out: "Send your child on an active holiday and get a grandchild within nine months," the ad persuaded.

The campaign features some raunchy, laughable, even slightly NSFW content -- but the worry it targets is sound.

"The Danish welfare system is under pressure. There are still not enough babies being born, despite a little progress. And this concerns us all," the video says.

Indeed, Denmark faces an aging population, where the number of young people aren't catching up to the number of elderly people. Danish women give birth to an average of 1.7 children, down from 1.9 children in 2010, per 2014 World Bank data.

Denmark is not the only country facing a shortage of babies, or one where citizens are being encouraged on a large scale to procreate.

In March 2014, the Japanese government invested 3 billion yen (about $25 million) in funding matchmaking and dating sites and "konkatsu" parties, where single young people can meet and mingle. It also approved measures in March 2015 to give families with three or more children more social support and increase the number of men taking state-subsidized paternity leave from 2.03 percent to 13 percent of the male workforce by 2020. Japan's already aging population shrank by 268,000 people in 2014, when the number of people who died surpassed that of people born, the Washington Post reported January.

Similarly, in France, where people have tended to marry and have children later in life, the government has long provided tax incentives and collective care facilities as a means to encourage women to procreate earlier in life. And it's worked: 12.38 babies are born to every 1,000 people in France -- higher than the EU average, where 10.2 babies are born to 1,000 people, per CIA statistics.

But Spies Rejner wants to go a step further: The travel agency even provided six exercise videos to invigorate men and women's sex drives.

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