Grumbling about travel has become a social-media and conversational staple. The world is overcrowded and too hot, airports are awful, flights get delayed or cancelled, service is un-obliging, and hotels and restaurants never seem quite up to standard. These may sometimes be legitimate complaints, but the whole of travel gets tainted by association, until it begins to seem like a chore.
Yet, the reality is that travel now has never been easier or offered more choices compared to any other time in human history. We ought to be glad we live in such happy times. We ought to caper in delight at our ability to whiz across the globe in comfort and safety, and access even the remotest places.
The past casts a sentimental glow, and so perhaps we’ve simply chosen to forget all the challenges that travel entailed just a few decades ago. Almost everything about it has changed for the better. We’ve never had it so good.
.. or have we? With mostly national airlines operating in the skies and little competition, route networks were once modest, and airlines could charge what they wanted.
A change for the better came in the 1960s with the likes of Southwest Airlines in America, and in the 1980s in Europe, when Irish carrier Ryanair started flying. Generations of discount airlines began making air travel much cheaper. Ryanair now flies more than 50 million passengers a year on 543 routes around Europe.
No matter what unusual route you may want to fly, airlines with funny-sounding names (Buzz, WizzAir, Firefly, Spice Jet) will take you there at very low cost. The effect has filtered through the whole industry: a return flight between Melbourne and Singapore cost two months’ average salary in 1980, but now costs a week’s wages. Budget airlines get lots of complaints, but travellers ought to rejoice.
While you mightn’t always find the best deal and will get no personalised advice, booking a flight, rental car or hotel these days is exhilaratingly easy: a few internet minutes and the deal is done anywhere across the globe. Remember those bad old days, when travel bookings were onerous and time-consuming? They were made over the phone (which could take an hour) or at a travel agency, which might involve multiple visits. The first computerised booking systems appeared in the early 1960s, but travel agencies could only access them from the mid-1970s, couldn’t work with multiple airlines, and ultimately still had to phone the airline ticketing agent.
Only in the 1990s did the global distribution system (GDS) make things easier, but by then internet and online travel sites had appeared. Tippy tap, and our bookings were done. From 2009, we could make them on our mobile phones, too.
Happy days. Okay, we have to go way back, but it’s always good to remember that, for nearly all of human history, travel proceeded at a walking pace, and we couldn’t expect to go more than 30 kilometres a day on land. Only the rich could afford horses, which might take travellers 60 kilometres.
Wheeled vehicles were a rarity for passenger transport until the Renaissance. In 1774, a 210-kilometre stagecoach journey from London to Bristol took 24 hours. Ships were the easiest way to travel, but still a horrible experience.
In the 19th century, it took four months to get from Australia to Europe. Conditions were cramped, hygiene horrible, shipwrecks not uncommon. If you’re squeezed into economy class and complaining about a one-hour delay and the in-flight food, take heart.
Your journey’s speed would seem like witchcraft to previous generations, and you won’t be picking weevils out of your biscuits. Making sure we had available money while overseas once required considerable planning. We either had to wire funds in advance to some distant foreign bank, or prepare travellers’ cheques, which had to be signed in front of our bank teller, and signed again whenever we cashed them in – if we could find somewhere to do so.
Now money is readily available from ATMs, we can pay by credit card, or we can use phone QR codes in the remotest of places at the smallest of businesses – even street noodle stalls in rural China. Once, you worried that your cashed $200 would run out and leave you stranded. Now your bank balance is the only limitation.
Another thing to rejoice in is the disappearance of multiple currencies following the introduction of physical euros in 2002. Who remembers being confused by schillings, marks, guilders, francs, pesetas and lira? Nightmare. Okay, there was certain freedom in disappearing into the blue for weeks and having no contact with anyone back home.
Then again, imagine the worries of many parents, who were in the dark about how their children were doing – or even where they were. In the old days, we rarely had the chance to communicate. We collected weeks-old letters at the occasional poste restante , and fired off brief postcards.
Otherwise, we sat in stifling telephone cubicles in post offices to make expensive calls for just a few crackly minutes. It often took far longer to relay the phone number to an operator and wait to get connected. Thanks to social-media apps, everything has changed.
It’s a marvel that in distant places we can fire off messages or photos to our mothers, brothers or friends and – ping – get an instant reply. Wonderful. Travel in the old days was a leap into the unknown that can hardly be conceived by today’s young travellers.
All we had to go on were recommendations of friends or chance-met strangers, or whatever information was gleaned from weighty guidebooks. We didn’t know how to get from A to B, or how long it would take, until we arrived at the train station. We had no idea where to eat, or how much an entrance ticket might cost until we arrived at the booth.
Travel was ignorance, but ignorance wasn’t always bliss. Sometimes we let old ladies drag us from ferry quays to rooms in their houses that might turn out to be awful. A half-hour wasted, and back to square one.
A lot of power lies in knowing things. Hurrah for a mobile phone connected to the internet: our day-to-day travel choices and planning are better for it. Certainly, our spending power increases as we get older, but that isn’t the only reason our accommodation options have improved.
The travel diaries of medieval pilgrims, grand tourists and Victorian-era travellers are littered with complaints about the squalor, smokiness, fleas, mouldy bread and insolent service at inns. While that may be the experience only of some hapless backpackers these days, most of us remember a time when the height of hotel luxury was a plastic shampoo bottle, a little plastic package of soap, a kettle and extra pillow. Now we’ve come to expect brand-name toiletries, coffee machines, pillows galore, mood lighting and fancy bathrooms.
The average hotel room provides far more comfort than even kings in times gone by could possibly have enjoyed. Remind yourself, as you enjoy your rain shower and snuggle into a comfortable bed, that even now, most people on the planet won’t get to enjoy such pleasures, ever. Another thing we didn’t know, once, was where we were, or how we were going to get where we wanted to go.
We exited airports or bus stations feeling anxious. Whole cities lay before us and our only directions came from passing strangers or fold-out maps. We didn’t know the way to our hotel.
We didn’t know where tourist attractions were located, how to get there, or how long it would take, and we spent a lot of time simply trying to find our way around. Not any more. These days, we’re never really lost.
We already know where everything is. Absolutely everything: that shop, this restaurant, the country castle, the motorway exit. We can follow the blue line on our digital map, or our rental car’s GPS instructions.
Only when they occasionally stop working, and we’re forced to blunder around, does it remind us that once, everything was this difficult. Even just a few years ago, translation apps were hilariously hit-and-miss, and we had to confine ourselves to the most basic of typed sentences to achieve credible translations. No longer.
Computers have become exponentially better at languages, and AI is a game changer. Today we essentially have a simultaneous interpreter in our pockets. Whip out our smartphones and we can get credible translations not only of typed text but spoken words too.
That opens up interactions with people where once a mere smile or awkward hand signal had to suffice. We can also point our phones at foreign words and instantly know what they mean. Nowhere is that more useful than in restaurants, where translation apps can not only decipher menus for us – even in other scripts such as Russian or Korean – but show us examples of the dishes in images and recipes.
In 2024, Australian passport holders have access to 190 countries for tourism purposes either without needing a visa at all, or requiring only an ESTA (electronic system for travel authorisation) or visa on arrival. Many of the places for which we do need visas – Afghanistan, Chad, North Korea, Sudan, Yemen – aren’t exactly high on our travel bucket lists. That ranks us in the top six nationalities when it comes to freedom of travel.
We’ve been in the top 10 over the last 20 years. Information about visas before that is difficult to come by, but a fair bet is that travel wasn’t as easy. ESTAs and online visas didn’t exist, and certainly Australians needed non-digital visas for countries such as Brazil and Eastern European nations.
In the 1990s, we even needed visas for France and Portugal for a time. In the 1980s, a meal on a cruise ship may have opened with shrimp cocktail or chicken liver, moved on with turkey steak and cauliflower, and finished with a caramel custard or monotonous ice-cream variation. And it wasn’t only on cruise ships that food was uninventive and narrow in range.
In China at the same time, non-Chinese food was almost unknown. In Switzerland, Asian restaurants were virtually unheard of, while in Britain, meat and three overcooked veg was staple fare. Anywhere outside the US, the opening of a McDonalds was considered a culinary event.
Today’s travellers have no idea how good they have it. Not only has dining become ever more sophisticated and varied but, no matter where we are, we can find alternatives to local cuisines if we suddenly fancy a change. Tuck into Mexican, Thai, Peruvian, Spanish or Moroccan, or adventurous fusion cuisines.
Our world is now our internationally flavoured oyster. Do you recall the days when we worried about using our cameras because of the expense of processing slides? Developing slides was a significant cost to anyone on a budget. We had to own a slide projector and screen, too.
The alternative was to print photos and even they weren’t cheap. We had to spend hours writing captions for them, and then slot them into the fiddly plastic sleeves of photo albums. They soon went yellow.
These days, we can record our entire holiday without concern about how many photos we’re taking. Snapping multiple photos allows us to winnow out the best, and enhanced camera and phone technology has also improved our efforts. What’s more, we can take photos of trivial things we’d never have wasted film on before: a funny sign, an old boot with flowers growing out of it, our train carriage or hotel room.
The result? We can relive our travels as never before, and that’s a wonderful bonus. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment below or write to us at [email protected] and we’ll publish the most interesting responses.
Overcrowding While we should be happy more and more of us can afford to travel, it’s hard to enjoy overrun old towns and national parks – especially if we’ve visited them previously, and have memories of enjoyable peace and elbow room. Photo posing Some people presumably enjoy posing, but aren’t most of us a bit tired of the endless need to have our photos taken against scenic or monumental backdrops? We only had to pose once or twice in the past; now it seems we do it every few minutes. Too much information Access to all knowledge has its downside.
Too much dithering over endless choices, too much fear of missing out, and most of all a dwindling sense of surprise and adventure: we know what to expect long before we arrive. Charging devices We not only have to carry multiple devices, cords and plugs with us, but need to find places to recharge them, and are constantly fretting about batteries running out. In the old days, there was no need for a socket, let alone three.
Less independence In the past, only Lonely Planet dictated part of what we did. Now everything is curated online. Have we lost our initiative, confidence, sense of direction and ability to go with the flow as a result? Queueing Oh happy days when we could just rock up at the Eiffel Tower or Statue of Library whenever we liked, buy a ticket, and proceed on in.
Now we have to book timed tickets well in advance, or join monstrous queues. Social-media addiction Is modern travel really experienced first-hand and enjoyed in the moment as it once was? Or is it filtered through the lens of our phone, adjusted for social-media likes, and considered an exercise in boasting? More guilt Look, this is undoubtedly a good thing. We should feel guilty about our carbon footprint, impact on the planet, and social responsibilities.
But it’s hard to travel these days without wondering if we’re doing it right – or should be doing it at all. Bland predictability Yes, the world is getting more and more homogenous. Airports look the same, high-speed trains erode the eccentricity of rail travel, rickety public-transport options such as the Turkish dolmus or Thai tuk-tuk are replaced by taxis, and fast-food joints are everywhere.
Less human interaction There was something good about doing things the old-fashioned way: we got to talk to travel agents, post office clerks and people in train stations, and asked random strangers all manner of questions. Soon, all we might end up with are holograms and robots..
