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Why Don't American's Travel?
Jan. 30th, 2012 03:32 pmA Danish cartoonist recently asked in her blog why so few Americans travel outside their states, let alone outside their country. It's a reasonable question. This is my answer.
I've traveled fairly extensively within the US, but visited only a few countries — Japan, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, St. Lucia, and Canada. Part of the problem is the expense. It costs at least $500 to fly overseas, and that's if you find a really good deal.
It also takes a long time to get there. From where I live near San Francisco, it's eleven hours in the air to get to the UK or Japan, and with the requirement you be at the airport two hours before an international departure, you have to tack on at least three hours of additional travel time from doorstep to doorstep. So you've lost a full day to travel. Then you're several time zones off from home, so you lose another day or two to jet-jag.
You don't want to travel all that way only to turn around and come right back. so you want to stay at least a week, and preferably longer, but Americans are lucky if they get two weeks of paid vacation a year, and many of us don't get paid vacation at all. What vacation time we do get, we often need to use to see family and friends here in the States.
Add to that the fact that the United States is geographically huge. Most Europeans I've met are completely unprepared for the scale of the US on their first visit here. I live in California and my family live in Tennessee. To visit them, I have to take two flights, traveling for eight to nine hours, and costing an average of $400. To drive or take a train would take four to five days. Again, after such a large investiture of time, I want to spend as much time at my destination as possible, and even if my travels have been confined to the lower 48 states (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) I could still be up to three hours off of my original time zone and dealing with jet lag.
Back to the scale issue. I can drive six hours north or nine hours south before I reach another state (well, if I go south I reach Mexico, but you get my point: California is big.) If I drive east, taking the shortest and most direct route across California at its narrowest point, it will take me four hours before I reach the next state, Nevada, and another six and a half hours before I get to the next state, Utah. The east coast states are a good deal smaller than the states in the west, so people in the east tend to travel interstate a little more easily and often than midwest and westerners, but for the most part once you leave the east coast it takes a long time to get from one state to another.
Time which we don't have, because we get such paltry vacations, if we get them at all. And money which we may not have because those aren't paid vacations.
I would be loathe to ascribe Americans' lack of interstate and international travel to incuriosity. It has a lot more to do with those twin bugaboos: time and money.
(here's a good infographic showing US passport ownership statistics broken down by state )
I've traveled fairly extensively within the US, but visited only a few countries — Japan, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, St. Lucia, and Canada. Part of the problem is the expense. It costs at least $500 to fly overseas, and that's if you find a really good deal.
It also takes a long time to get there. From where I live near San Francisco, it's eleven hours in the air to get to the UK or Japan, and with the requirement you be at the airport two hours before an international departure, you have to tack on at least three hours of additional travel time from doorstep to doorstep. So you've lost a full day to travel. Then you're several time zones off from home, so you lose another day or two to jet-jag.
You don't want to travel all that way only to turn around and come right back. so you want to stay at least a week, and preferably longer, but Americans are lucky if they get two weeks of paid vacation a year, and many of us don't get paid vacation at all. What vacation time we do get, we often need to use to see family and friends here in the States.
Add to that the fact that the United States is geographically huge. Most Europeans I've met are completely unprepared for the scale of the US on their first visit here. I live in California and my family live in Tennessee. To visit them, I have to take two flights, traveling for eight to nine hours, and costing an average of $400. To drive or take a train would take four to five days. Again, after such a large investiture of time, I want to spend as much time at my destination as possible, and even if my travels have been confined to the lower 48 states (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) I could still be up to three hours off of my original time zone and dealing with jet lag.
Back to the scale issue. I can drive six hours north or nine hours south before I reach another state (well, if I go south I reach Mexico, but you get my point: California is big.) If I drive east, taking the shortest and most direct route across California at its narrowest point, it will take me four hours before I reach the next state, Nevada, and another six and a half hours before I get to the next state, Utah. The east coast states are a good deal smaller than the states in the west, so people in the east tend to travel interstate a little more easily and often than midwest and westerners, but for the most part once you leave the east coast it takes a long time to get from one state to another.
Time which we don't have, because we get such paltry vacations, if we get them at all. And money which we may not have because those aren't paid vacations.
I would be loathe to ascribe Americans' lack of interstate and international travel to incuriosity. It has a lot more to do with those twin bugaboos: time and money.
(here's a good infographic showing US passport ownership statistics broken down by state )
