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Your suitcase is packed, the e-ticket printed, and the cab is en route to take you to the airport. Are you ready to get away and get it on?

Sex is as much a part of vacations these days as tucked-in sheets and overpriced cocktails, and the Mile High Club has seemingly been replaced with the Miles Away Club, with people engaging in erotic behaviour in increasingly exotic locales.

A couple was fined this week after having sex at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in northern France, while a British woman faces harsh punishment for having sex on the beach in Dubai.

And although despoiling war memorials and offending conservative faiths should not be a turn-on, countless couples do seem intent on taking their lovemaking on the road, recreating the beach scene of From Here to Eternity, sand mites and fellow travellers be damned.

Exciting international places to have sex are touted on various Internet sites and personal Web pages. So why are so many people trading in their sightseeing guides for The Rough Guide to Getting Naked?

“A lot of people who are nice and proper here, do things more out of line when they are away,” said Aurora Benzion, co-owner of the Toronto nightclub Wicked, which caters to swingers. “People are less inhibited.”

Having sex in a new location can be as titillating as hooking up with a new partner, she said, and can add a much-needed shot of excitement to an intimate relationship.

“It's the anonymity. You put a mask on people and they're totally different,” she said. “The real personality comes out.”

A Summer Sex Survey done by condom maker Durex in 2006 found that people on vacation are most likely to have sex in a hotel room, but will also engage in amore in the pool, at the beach and on the hotel balcony.

In Men's Health magazine, an article discussing the top reader-submitted vacation spots for sex included the Grand Canyon and a New York ferry.

“The castle in Prague,” one reader reminisced. “My boyfriend and I took the self-guided tour. We went down a staircase and ended up in a very large, empty, dark, stone room. A little spooky, but I would definitely do it again.”

For some love makers, the more adventurous the location, the better.

On one Facebook group dedicated to exotic sex locales, a Toronto man admits to doing it “in a helicopter on the way up Revelstoke's Mount Mackenzie in British Columbia.”

In Sex and Tourism: Journeys of Romance, Love and Lust, tourism professors Thomas G. Bauer and Bob McKercher describe the relationship between travel and intimacy.

Although the words “sex tourism” have become synonymous with prostitution, the authors argue that “the vast majority of people who engage in sex when they travel do so with their regular partners. …

“Sometimes sex or the prospect of sexual encounters at the destination or along the way plays a central role in the decision to travel,” the book states.

In interviews with motel owners, travel guides, backpackers and other industry experts, the book concludes that tourism is a major facilitator of human intimacy.

“There are numerous tourist destinations that have traded strongly on their association with romance, love and sex,” the book states.

But not every country is happy about their coital connections, and some tourists can land themselves in hot water by getting spicy in public.

On the Greek island of Zakynthos, public sex among tourists is such a problem that in 2005, a local member of parliament called for the immediate extradition of any couples caught in the act.

In Britain, a phenomenon called “dogging” has seen a rise of people having sex and watching people have sex in public parks.

The British newspaper The Independent on Sunday quoted Richard Byrne, an environmental affairs expert, saying the country's parks are being used for more than just Frisbee tossing.

“From a study we did 18 months ago, we reckon about 60 per cent of the country parks are affected by dogging,” Dr. Byrne said.

Michelle Palmer, the 36-year-old British woman arrested in Dubai after being caught having sex with a man on Jumeirah Beach, has reportedly been charged with having sex outside marriage, indecent behaviour in public and being drunk in public, and faces up to six years in jail.

In the case of the Vimy war memorial, Alain Robillard and Jackie Boldoduc were charged after posting an Internet video of their erotic encounter at the historic landmark.

They were ordered by a French court to pay a symbolic €1 ($1.60) in damages to Canada for despoiling its First World War memorial, and were given a suspended four-month jail term and a €500 fine.

But the couple were not the first to engage in such inappropriate behaviour at the site.

Their punishment came just six months after another couple were fined for taking nude photographs of themselves in the same place, and police said that similar incidents have been reported at other memorials.

“It is a problem which appears to be getting worse,” a police spokesman told the Telegraph. “People appear to get a perverse pleasure out of this behaviour.”