Is Travel Dead?

In this new age of uncertainty, the future doesn’t look bright nor dull. What does that mean for travel in the new abnormal?

Bienvenidos. Vitam vas. እንኳን ደህና መጣህ።. Willkommen. კეთილი იყოს თქვენი. Aloha. स्वागत

Welcome to Trip Out. This is not leisure. This is not luxury. This is not a resort. This is not a vacation. This is not a tourist vs. traveler debate.

This is a trip.

What else is this? Is it a blog? A new travel publication that’s going to tell you how to “travel like a local”? None of the abvoe.. Travel writer Paul Theroux said, “travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” And most of the content on here is retrospective, not to mention introspective, subjective, and reflective. This is simply a digital magazine that I made to amuse myself and no one else. If you want to come along for the journey, great.

At the time of writing, no one is even sure what travel or travel writing is going to look like in the near and distant future. Inquiring minds what to know: is travel dead?

The short ambiguous answer is that travel has always been dead. Or, rather, dying. Some people like to gaze back to the so-called “golden age” of travel: the days of Pan Am and TWA; the days of sipping martinis on flights; the days of extensive leg room and a place to lay your fedora or pillbox hat. It was a time when travel was a status symbol for the wealthier and more privileged among us. A few decades later, travel became accessible to a lot more people and the modus operandi of the airline industry shifted to accommodate us (i.e. to continue profiting from us). Airfares went down and so did the quality of the travel experience. For some, this was the birth of travel. For others, this was the death of travel.

Travel will always be dying and resurrecting, depending on who you talk to as well as the larger forces in the world that are out of our control (see COVID-19). Travel, really, is what you do when you get to that place, that point B you had your sights set on in point A since you started researching where to go and what to do there.

Philosopher Alan Watts said, “The reason we die is to give us the opportunity to understand what life’s all about. By letting go.”

So, let’s let go. Let’s let travel die. RIP Travel. Sayonara. Good riddance. Adiós. Doviđenja. And then let’s get on a plane, train, or bus again and open our minds to a whole new world that maybe we wouldn’t let ourselves see before. When it’s safe to do all that, of course.