"We brought one company phone and a personal phone," she says. If there hadn't been talk of a laptop ban, they would have taken their computer, too.
"We both checked emails once daily and texted colleagues as necessary," she says. "But then we shut down our business communications. This ensured the vacation remained a vacation."
That's the interesting thing about disconnecting in 2017: People say they want to do it. A recent Hilton Hotels & Resorts survey found that 77 per cent of travellers say they prefer a vacation where they are able to unplug from their life. But, ultimately, they don't. And when they fail, only 10 per cent say they're embarrassed about obsessively checking their smartphones and laptops.
That's not a real vacation, says Samantha Ettus, author of The Pie Life: A Guilt-Free Recipe For Success and Satisfaction.
"Just like you recharge your phone, you need to recharge your own battery with a real tech break," says Ettus, who specialises in offering corporations advice on work-life balance. "But you can't rely on your company or colleagues to set your boundaries for you. "That's your job."
Yet even Ettus acknowledges that a complete disconnect - say, leaving the phone home - may not be possible in 2017. Instead, she advises choosing a time of day to check email and messages and then closing your laptop for the evening. Keep the office work contained where possible.
In a perfect world, you wouldn't check messages at all. Consider what happened to Anna Beyder, who works for an Atlanta-based technology company. On a recent vacation, she decided to log into her email account - and regrets it.
"I opened an email that I thought was totally harmless only to find out that it said that my office was relocating to another city and I was being assigned to a new manager," she says. Although it didn't ruin her vacation, "I wish I hadn't opened it," she says.
But it's far from a perfect world. In a sense, leisure travellers like Beyder and Tsukimura are becoming more like business travelers, who don't even go to the bathroom without a device. I'm not making that up. A new Skyroam survey says that 98 per cent of road warriors use a smartphone "at all times." Nearly 60 per cent use a tablet computer and 70 per cent carry a laptop computer.
In addition to being unrealistic, unplugged vacations deprive travellers of a valuable tool: Your device can help you resolve problems quickly and get better customer service.
Laura Barta says she uses her phone to get directions when she's on vacation. Unplugging would mean leaving Google Maps at home. And because she's gone for two weeks at a time, it also helps to keep a smartphone if "anything really urgent" comes along, says Barta, who runs a toy company in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Perhaps the best reason to carry a device, even on vacation, is that it can quickly remedy a customer-service problem. Travel-industry employees - particularly airline workers - sometimes recoil in fear when you point a cellphone camera at them. The last thing they want is for their often rude behavior to be captured on video and distributed via social media. And a Facebook or Twitter post is often enough to get a service problem resolved in real time.
Of course, I don't recommend trying this every time an airline or hotel employee gives you an answer you don't like. But isn't it nice to know you can record an incident if it happens?
