Travel Has Become Really, *Really* Easy

This is a good thing. But it's also bad.

For the audio version of this article, read by the author, go here.

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Above Vernazza in Italy’s Cinque Terre.

A friend recently said to me, “Travel has become so easy I’m no longer sure if it means a person who travels a lot is interesting. If someone tells me they’ve been to Iraq, should I even care?”

It was an insulting way to put it, but my friend wasn’t wrong about travel becoming ridiculously easy.

Back in the mid-80s, when my brother and I were teenagers and my parents finally had enough money to travel, I remember my mom making arrangements for a trip she and my dad made to Europe. She picked a pension from the advertisements in the back of her beloved New Yorker magazine and mailed off a letter requesting a reservation.

A month later, she received a letter back, saying, “We have received your correspondence, and you are now booked for your requested time.”

Back then, my mom also worked closely with a travel agent, because travel was so complicated and mysterious that you needed a dedicated professional to guide you through it all.

I met Michael in the 90s, and before long, we started traveling too — on the cheap, unlike my parents. Travel was a bit easier then, thanks to amazing new developments like “email” and “websites.”

Unlike my mom, we made our hotel reservations on the fly as we traveled. In 1996, when Michael and I went on our month-long honeymoon to Ireland, we usually booked our next night’s lodging from a phone booth, always drawing on the wisdom of our trusty Lonely Planet guidebook.

It was often a challenge finding the place the next day, but we didn’t mind asking for directions. It was more annoying being stranded every now and then, and having to stay up all night.

And to get to Ireland, we’d had to rely on my mom’s travel agent; international plane travel was still really complicated. And even by the 90s and early 00s, if you needed to change your airline ticket, that meant a long exchange on the phone with the airline followed by a trip all the way out to the airport.

This area in Ireland is the westernmost point of Europe, and it was deserted in 1996, so Michael and I frolicked naked! Photo by Henrique Craveiro on Unsplash

Look, I know Michael and I — or even my parents before us — weren’t exactly the early Polynesians, setting off across the great expanse of the Pacific in nothing but dugout canoes.

But it blows my mind how much more difficult travel was back when I was younger. It wasn’t just making reservations. If you were traveling to a country where they spoke a foreign language, you had to study that language — and that meant taking a course in school or buying a bulky set of tapes, and then carrying a language phrase book with you on your trip.

Then there was the question of the destination itself, which was mostly a big void in your mind. Oh, you’d probably read some articles and a book or two. You’d seen photos of the big attractions, and the area had probably once been featured in a very American-centric movie or two. But you only ever knew the broadest of stereotypes.

What about those vast swaths of the world that Hollywood hadn’t ever portrayed or that didn’t yet have tourist bureaus? That was basically: Here there be dragons!

In 2001, Michael and I passed through this nothing little town in southern Turkey, on our way to the ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus. People looked at us like we were aliens from another planet. I felt like I’d landed on another planet too.

It was confusing and stressful. Then again, we figured it out. And none of this seemed that difficult at the time — it just was.

Twenty-some years later, travel couldn’t be more different.

Travel agents are mostly a thing of the past: everyone books their plane tickets and lodging on their phones.

Thanks to these same phones, we can’t ever get lost, or be out of contact with our friends, or not understand the local language. Google View lets us point our phones at almost anything — buildings, plants, animals, foreign words — and they’re instantly identified for us. Wi-fi and universal ATMS are everywhere.

As for expectations of upcoming destinations, well, it seems like almost every centimeter of the Planet Earth has now been Instagrammed, TikToked, YouTubed, and Substack travel newslettered — and, of course, logged into the AI brain of Google View.

I remember back in 2019, when Michael and I were living in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and I heard about this seaside trail past seven different beaches that started at a little village called Boca de Tomatlán, about fifteen kilometers south of our apartment.

The first beach past Boca de Tomatlán. Beautiful!

It sounded wonderful, but I had a question about which shoes I should wear, and I thought to myself, I wonder if there’s anything about this trail online.

When I checked, a zillion people had written about it — of course. There were even multiple YouTube videos that showed the entire trail, start to finish.

What’s incredible is that this was only five years ago. We all take for granted how quickly this massive amount of detailed travel information has accumulated.

Oh, and that nothing little Turkish town Michael and I passed through back in 2001, where we and the locals looked at each other like aliens?

It was Kusadasi, and Michael and I returned there last year to find a massive tourist hub, with a huge cruise ship terminal, sparkling new downtown boulevards full of tourist shops and restaurants, and a beautiful new boardwalk that ran all along the harbor. And the condos! There were hundreds of new buildings.

The “nothing” little Town of Kusadasi, in 2023.

You can find state-of-the-art amenities like that all over the world now, even in formerly remote locations. The trains to the five villages of Italy’s Cinque Terre used to be notoriously creaky and unreliable; now Italy runs the sleek, modern trains of something called the Cinque Terre Express between all five villages, and they leave all day long, every 15 minutes — not unlike the monorail at Disney World.

I know people love to complain about the cost of travel — and, yes, inflation has been very real lately. But the fact is, travel is way less expensive than it used to be. That’s why only rich people, like my parents in their later years, used to be able to do it.

One of the things that has most surprised me about getting older is the whole concept of “baseline readjustment”: younger people see some part of the status quo as completely normal, but I, having lived a bit longer, see it as a truly radical break from whatever came before.

(I think my sense of things is more accurate because I have a broader perspective, but then again, none of our memories is perfect, and older folks sometimes fall victim to nostalgia and other biases, remembering things differently than how they really were. At the same time, I get that the generation older than mine could’ve looked at how Michael and I traveled in the 90s and thought, “Oh, man, you had it so easy! You should have tried traveling in the 60s!”)

The greater point is that in 2024, travel has become easier than ever, and I have some decidedly mixed feelings about this.

It’s a small world — and getting smaller. Photo by NASA on Unsplash

On one hand, all these new conveniences are amazing — and they are convenient. Sure, technology can sometimes be frustrating, but it’s not like things weren’t ever frustrating pre-internet or pre-smartphone. Now we can do so many travel-related things with the mere click of a button.

And because it’s so easy and (relatively) cheap to travel, more people than ever are doing it. In 1950, 25 million people took an international trip. In 2018, 1.4 billion did.

For the first time in human history, it’s not just the rich who are enjoying the far reaches of our planet. Now the middle class travels too (at least the middle class from wealthy Western Countries).

But, of course, all this travel is coming at a terrible cost to the environment, at a time when we can least afford to be dumping even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Oh, look! Emissions exploded just as the whole world began to travel. Boden, T.A., Marland, G., and Andres R.J. (2015). Global, Regional, and National Fossil-Fuel CO₂ Emissions.

Over-tourism is a real problem too. All these amazing amenities — the spanking new (or recently renovated) airports that Michael and I see in every city, all over the world? They’re all mobbed.

Travel is “easier” now, but the hordes of people and long lines can still sometimes make it grueling.

And then there’s the lack of — hmm, what should I call it? Mystery in the world?

That seaside hike from Boca de Tomatlán, Mexico, really was lovely, but it was slightly less lovely because I’d seen it all ahead of time, and I mostly knew what to expect. The second after I watched that first YouTube video, I wished I hadn’t.

Then again, complaining about all this makes me a total hypocrite. After all, here I am, literally writing this travel newsletter.

Taylor Swift said it best: It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me!

I’m glad smartphones have made it impossible to ever be “lost,” because people are safer now. But it also makes me sad, because getting lost has led to some of the most interesting experiences of my life. And being lost — and learning to deal with the stress and anxiety that went along with it — gave me a resilience that I’m really glad I now possess.

Is my friend right — the one who made that insulting comment about travel no longer necessarily being an indication of anything “interesting”? Am I less interesting now than I would have been if I’d traveled to the same places thirty years ago?

It’s impossible to know.

Anyway, the only constant in life is change — whether I like all these changes or not.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out my new newsletter about my books and movies at BrentHartinger.com.