(or I Never Understood Why My Ancestors Hated Being on the Road So Much!)
The world is a book and those who do not travel only read one page.
—St. Augustine
Travel: What is the Purpose?
As we begin to consider the idea of travel, it is helpful to start with a brief reflection on why people travel at all. Probably every one of us has a different explanation for why we either love or hate traveling. As we have briefly discussed, the rewards of travel can be glorious, but the agonies can be gut-wrenching as well. Given this, we might ask why we even bother with travel unless it is completely necessary. Why don’t we just stay home as much as possible and buy more and more products to increase our comfort and pleasure? We could purchase a cozy bed, buy a great TV, stock our pantries with food, acquire a nice fluffy robe and so on, and just relax in our homes. Certainly, if we wanted to learn about the world and foreign places or see beautiful sights, we could simply tune in to a variety of travel or nature shows and never have to get up out of our chairs.
This then is the question. What are we looking for that is so important that we will put up with all of the hassles and irritants that mark modern travel? Why do we willingly leave the comfort of our homes to set out on journeys to distant places to seek something where outcomes are uncertain and rewards are often intangible? And why did people travel in the past when being on the road was probably even more potentially perilous than it is now? To consider these kinds of questions, let’s first talk briefly about the nature of travel and how it has changed over time.
Travel Today and Yesterday
To our distant ancestors, the notion of traveling undoubtedly had a very different meaning than it does for us today. Travel then was often not just emotionally challenging and tiresome, but also physically exhausting and quite dangerous. Few people had the means or even the desire to roam the world far away from their homes. Further, when people did travel, their goals were usually quite instrumental and specific. For instance, people traveled to locate food sources in times of famine, or they set out for religious reasons on holy pilgrimages to sacred shrines. Some traveled in order to promote trade, or to try to recover from illness by visiting so-called healing places (Csikszentmihaly and Coffey 2016). What people did not do nearly as much as in the present time, though, was travel for the sheer fun of it. This reason, in fact, would probably have never even occurred to most ancient people. Of course, now we travel for many reasons that would appear strange to our ancestors, and the things that give us satisfaction in travel are quite diverse (Chen, Mak and McKercher 2011; Moscardo 2011). For instance, we travel for what have been called push reasons such as the desire to escape or to get away from the pressures of modern life. We also travel for more external pull reasons such as the chance to experience great adventures or to encounter beautiful places or simply to relax (see Crompton 1979; Andersen, Prentice and Watanabe 2000). Regardless of our specific motives, however, most of us want to travel today to achieve some types of memorable experiences (Bowen and Clarke 2009; Pearce 2005; Schmitt 2003). This is important. It reflects a shift in how travel has been construed from being a tiresome burden we have to carry out for practical reasons to something we want to do to live our lives more fully. But why is having memorable experiences so important to us, and why are they so sought after? Let’s turn to that question next.
Travel as Experience
Research suggests that we often gain more pleasure from actively experiencing things than passively consuming products (Van Boven and Gilovich 2003). Experiences give us a deeper feeling of satisfaction and provide us with more of a sense of meaning and accomplishment (see Pine and Gilmore 1998, for a discussion of the experience economy). In fact, some have suggested that what is most important these days is not so much what particular services or goods are offered to us, but rather what we can do with these goods and services, or how creatively we can interact with them (Pine and Gilmore 2019). For instance, when we travel instead of simply wanting to be passive participants on a tour, more and more of us desire to be directly and actively involved in a variety of tour activities. This means that in addition to simply listening to a talk on how to make a certain type of bread given by a local guide on some excursion to Germany, many of us appreciate having a chance to try out the bread-making process ourselves. We also increasingly like to have choices about what we see and do, and in this sense, often love occasions where we can co-create our experiences with our travel providers (Mackenzie and Kerr 2013). As an example, imagine a situation in which a tour guide takes a group of us to a certain famous garden in some area because she has learned that several people in our group have a particular interest in plants and flowers. In this instance, both we and our tour guide co-determine the travel agenda together.
Many of us, thus, want more participatory involvement in the process of travel itself. This is the case whether we are searching for highly energetic travel adventures or more quiet and serene experiences of rest and escape. This is also the case whether we are embarking on more structured, organized group tours, or prefer setting out on our own to explore our world. Travel is increasingly becoming a dynamic, interactive encounter between our travel providers and us as we engage with each other to facilitate optimal travel outcomes. We will look more at this process of active engagement between us and our travel providers in subsequent chapters of this book as we continue to examine what it means to travel well.
Chapter 1: Questions for Discussion
Before we turn to new themes, though, in order to think more about the ideas presented in Chapter 1, please work on the following questions. As you answer these questions, draw on your own personal experiences and/or your experiences in some aspect of the travel industry.
1. How has travel changed over your lifetime? In what ways would you say it is different today than it was when you were a child? Is this a change for better or for worse? Discuss.
2. What does the idea of memorable experience in travel mean to you? Give some specific examples to support your answer.
3. As we have seen, many of us like to have more choices today over our travel venues than we did in the past and often appreciate chances to co-create experiences with our travel providers. Is this true in your own travel experience or the experience of others you have known? If yes, explain. What are the downsides of having more choices?
4. The idea of engaged versus more passive travel styles was also discussed briefly in this chapter. What sort of travel venues have you been involved with that particularly lent themselves to the creation of engaged travel opportunities? What does this idea mean to you? Explain.
Notes