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My question is about the use of present perfect tense. To my knowledge this tense is used for the actions that have started in the past and continues up until now. I have questions about different cases for the same thing:

  1. Lets assume that I went to another country for a vacation and I stayed there for a few days. Now today is my last day in that country and now I will return and I am calling a taxi and the receptionist in the hotel asks me how my trip was and I answer him: It's been lovely to be here or to stay here /It was lovely to be here or to stay here

  2. I am in the airplane waiting to go back. Now another persons asks me the same question and which tense should I use?

  3. I have returned and I arrived at my home country. For example my father asks me the same question and which tense should I use?

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  • It's been lovely staying here. / It's been lovely staying here. / It was lovely staying there.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Dec 24, 2017 at 0:59

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1) Lets assume that I went to another country for a vacation and I stayed there for a few days. Now today is my last day in that country and now I will return and I am calling a taxi and the receptionist in the hotel asks me how my trip was and I answer him: It's been lovely to be here or to stay here /It was lovely to be here or to stay here

"It's been lovely". If you're talking about your trip as a whole being lovely, I would just leave it at that and not include the 'to stay here' bit. If you're saying that a particularly lovely part of your trip was the hotel, you could say "it's been lovely staying here"

Equally you could actually say "it was lovely"/"it was lovely staying here" - to me, both actually mean the same thing in this case

2) I am in the airplane waiting to go back. Now another persons asks me the same question and which tense should I use?

I would say that if you are still in the country, the same answer applies as above ("it was/has been lovely").

3) I have returned and I arrived at my home country. for example my father asks me the same question and which tense should I use?

Now the only appropriate tense becomes the simple past - "it was lovely"

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  • Could we say that "It's been lovely" equals saying "I FEEL good about the whole experience" while "It was lovely" equals saying "The TIME of the trip was lovely, I will forever remember that wonderful things happened and all the lovely moments"?
    – Gamal Thomas
    Commented Sep 3, 2020 at 12:52

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