Traveling Sucks!
I’ll be a frontrunner here and go out on a limb to say that traveling sucks. In addition to being wildly expensive, travel sucks because it’s time consuming, exhausting, and a major inconvenience at almost every level. These are probably the reasons we often hear people say they need a vacation from their vacation.
After years of international travel, and more than a dozen trips over the last eight months alone, I’ve decided to minimize my travel exposure going forward. I know that in doing so I will miss out on many untold wonders around the world, but my life is already fulfilling enough to rival anything a trip to a new land can offer.
At any rate, here are my thoughts on why traveling sucks and is an overrated pastime.
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What Traveling Really Consists Of
Technology has probably been the main culprit turbocharging a travel industry that contributed $3.9 trillion or 4.5% of global GDP in 2021, with projections showing that the industry will grow by 5.8% this year alone.
Whether it be through social media, television, or on the cover of magazines – we’ve all seen the grand images of friends or other perfect couples living their best lives with a backdrop of crystal blue waters or mysterious ancient ruins.
Seeing other people live it up in exotic locations makes us want to travel so we can have our own slice of the good life. Thankfully, all we have to do is book our tickets and off to paradise we go.
With so much hype around travel, it can be hard to imagine any possible downsides.
It seems that no one ever talks about what goes on behind the scenes of the travel experience to make all of the illustrious vacations come to fruition. What traveling really consists of is exorbitant expenses, abundant annoyances, and a multitude of inconveniences that hardly make it worth it in my estimation.
As such, I think it is time to shine the spotlight on the entire process to show you just how much traveling sucks in real life.
My Current Trip Shows How Much Traveling Sucks
I started writing this post while sitting in a traffic jam on Florida’s I-75 South from Tampa to Miami. Anyone who’s made the 4 hour drive would know what I mean when I say that it is a pretty miserable trek across Florida’s no man’s land which is better known as the Everglades.
It turns out I had to make the trip after my 45 minute American Airlines flight from Tampa to Miami was indiscriminately canceled by the airline with no explanation at 10:22pm – which was only 12 hours notice before scheduled departure.
Learning about a flight cancellation so late in the night was a major slap in the face because it left me with no options aside from waking up at 6 a.m. to dash 45 minutes across town to pick up an unplanned car rental for $270. All so I can then drive like a madman for an additional 4 hours across the state to make it in time to a new flight that I had to purchase at the last minute from a different airline.
No worries though as American Airlines “did me a solid” by automatically rescheduling the canceled flight to a new one that was more than 24 hours later than the one they canceled. It was a nice gesture but I ultimately called, canceled, and demanded a refund instead of accepting the sneaky flight credit they tried to give me.
By now you get the premise of this post, so let’s just dive right into my detailed analysis of why travel sucks.
Traveling Sucks Because It’s Expensive
Of all the ways we can spend our time, traveling is unquestionably one of the most expensive. Exorbitant costs are my primary reason for deciding to limit my travel exposure going forward. Even if I traveled less, the bang for the buck of travel just isn’t there. Here is a breakdown of costs associated with my current 3 night international trip for my nephew’s birthday:
In spite of the fact that this trip ran me $444 per night, the costs could have been even higher considering I lodged with family rather than at a hotel or Airbnb. My trip also didn’t involve all of the touristy stuff people normally do when they travel. Yet, I still ended up spending a hefty amount that I could have better put toward my $50,000 savings goal.
How Are People Affording Travel?
It pains me to spend so much money traveling. But I don’t take for granted being fortunate enough to do it.
Bankrate estimates that it would cost a single person $165 per day to travel domestically within the U.S. for a week. At the same time, Valuepenguin reports that it costs $271 per day for international trips. And finally, a survey by Forbes found that about half of the 1,000 respondents planned to spend at least $4,000 traveling in 2023 with another 30% of respondents budgeting $2,000 – $3,999 for their excursions
Given these numbers, I do often wonder how many of my fellow travelers foot the costs of traveling considering 80% of households in the U.S. earn less than $150,000. The average household earning $75,000 per year would be spending 5% or more of their pre-tax earnings for a week-long domestic trip and an even larger share for international travel.
Any short lived pastime that can easily eat up more than 5% of your hard earned money is not one I think should be so popular. This represents a huge chunk of money for what comes down to a luxury discretionary expense that can be easily substituted for cheaper alternatives closer to home.
Given the steep costs, I say that traveling sucks.
Traveling Sucks Because It’s Time Consuming
Costs notwithstanding, traveling also sucks because of the sheer amount of time required to do it.
Here’s a visual outline of the travel process which I think can be summarized in 5 distinct phases as summarized below. The exact steps in your travel process may differ slightly, but the point still remains that the traveling process is one that is highly involved.
Phase 1: Travel Prep
The traveling process begins with determination that we will take a trip and ideation on where we will go. This step alone could take a significant amount of time narrowing down to a single location when practically every destination is on the menu.
With our destination selected, we must then make the trip a reality by solidifying all of the accommodations and our trip itinerary to bring it all to fruition. Sifting through hotels, flight options, tour options, and other logistics can also be a time consuming process.
The final step of the travel prep phase is the process of packing, procuring trip necessities, getting the house ready for our absence, and other such mandatory items.
I wager that most people would have put in a minimum of 15 hours to complete all of the steps to prepare for travel. Once done, we’re finally ready to start executing on those travel plans.
Phase 2: Travel To Destination
With the bags packed and plans set, the next phase of the travel process is the actual ‘travel’ part where we shuttle ourselves from our homes to our destinations.
The duration of your flight is one component of this phase, but you must also factor in the time it takes to get to the airport, get through the airport, and get to your accommodation. If you’re like me, it’s at that point you can finally take a sigh of relief.
The specifics of each trip determines the time required, but each leg of the airport takes 2-3 hours plus all of the other shuttling to get where we need to go.
Phase 3: At Destination
Most vacation itineraries are full of activities that require a lot of wasted time to complete. Imagine for example poor folks who travel thousands of miles to go to Disney to arrive at the park for a day full of idleness and waiting around in Florida’s scorching hot sun.
The time required here will vary, but this sort of wasted time can amount to hours or days depending on trip itinerary and duration.
Phase 4: Travel Home
The last day of the trip is usually a bittersweet one because, while we’ve had fun, it’s also back to reality. To add insult to injury is the fact that we now have to repeat the entire ‘travel’ process one more time to get back home.
An ideal scenario would be for the duration of this trip to at least mirror the first, but as we know, nothing is ever predictable when airlines and mother nature are involved.
For instance, last year I had an 18 hour weather delay in Baltimore’s airport that pushed my patience to it’s limit as I was surrounded by hyperactive teenage volleyball and basketball players who could not seem to sit down and relax.
Phase 5: Returning To Normalcy
I have a general rule where I never book return trips to deposit me back home in the evenings before returning to work. I know I require time to transition back into my normal life and getting home late on a Sunday night would give me no time to get things in order.
We must factor in time for unpacking, getting groceries, checking emails, and anything else required to successfully manage our lives.
Traveling Sucks Because The Process Is Annoying
I took the liberty of documenting all of the steps of my return trip to get a visual depiction of how ridiculous the entire traveling experience can be. Here it is:
The 10 red blocks in the process represent individual lines that I was required to wait in. There are an additional 6 green blocks representing the various checkpoints encountered during the process.
Line, Gatekeeper, Line, Gatekeeper, Line
I started documenting this process out of annoyance after noticing that all it consisted of was a series of lines that were each manned by a gatekeeper, who then gave you access to yet another line manned by yet another gatekeeper.
Enormous crowds, gawking tourists, and crying babies are the tip of the iceberg of annoyances that make the traveling process suck. On top of all of these annoyance, we are also herded through the airport like cattle in a factory.
These, and other annoyances are a real part of the reasons traveling sucks, yet many people tolerate them without second thought for the privilege of landing at our destinations for even more of the same.
Traveling Sucks Because It’s Unhealthy
Last year I met a fellow consultant who’d spent more than a decade traveling the world to various clients. We talked a bit about everything, but one thing that stood out was his mention of the negative impacts serial traveling had on his overall health.
To no surprise, travel in the short run can increase a person’s stress levels while also causing dehydration, increased blood pressure, and risk of developing deep vein thrombosis. In the long run, frequent flying exposes people to radiation levels in excess of those encountered by nuclear power workers and can accelerate the aging process due to the stressors it places on the body.
The negative effects of traveling are well documented, but often not discussed. I suspect that many in the general public are simply unaware of these downsides like I was until only recently.
The health implications alone may not be enough to dissuade people from doing it, but when combined with all of the other factors, I believe this creates a clear picture of how traveling sucks.
Traveling Sucks Because It Harms People And Places We Visit
They say tourism brings jobs, but what is not mentioned is the type of jobs and flow of money from the tourism industry to the local communities that makes it all possible.
Part of my research for this post involved watching a documentary called The Last Tourist which shed light on negative impacts travel has on people and places frequented by tourists. I learned many surprising things from the documentary, but it was parts around exploitation that stood out most.
For example, The African country Kenya sees 2 million tourists per year but only keeps 14% of every dollar spent in the country due to leakage of the remaining dollars abroad. When this happens tourism is in essence perpetuating poverty and inequality as Kenya provides labor and resources while not reaping the rewards.
Yet another form of exploitation highlighted in the documentary is the more than 500,000 animals that are used to entertain travelers on their vacations. In Southeast Asia alone, there are over 3,000 captive elephants that had to be brutally tortured in order to “train them” to submit to their handlers.
And finally, one more example would be Cambodia, which since 2005 has seen an 75% increase in children’s orphanages which some believe is the direct result of mass “voluntourism”. They believe that operators in Cambodia are responding to financial incentives as they seek to exploit children for the foreign dollars that traveling volunteers bring into the area. What’s disturbing is that 80% of the orphanage children have at least one living parent whom they’ve been separated from.
Traveling Sucks, So What To Do Instead
With a bit of thought and creativity, we will quickly find that there are many attractive options for spending our time outside of travel.
I believe clearly seeing these options starts with allowing yourself to think outside of the box. It also involves shaping our lives to be ones that are so great that travel suddenly becomes less attractive.
The Mundane, The New, & The Unfamiliar Makes Traveling Alluring
Back in 2014, I lived in an apartment that was a short 20 minute drive from South Florida’s Dania Beach before moving further south the following year to a place that was just 30 minutes from Miami’s famed South Beach.
One would think I would have taken advantage of close proximity to some of the world’s top travel destinations by going to the beach as often as possible. But I didn’t. In fact, I estimate that I went to the beach fewer than 5 times in 18 months of living in the area.
I didn’t go to the beach more because, by living so close to it, the beach lost allure. It was now just a place down the street from my house that was full of tourists.
This experience showed me that much of what makes a place like the beach and other destinations attractive is the allure of them being new, foreign, and unfamiliar to us. In other words, travel thrusts us for a short time in places and activities that are more exciting than our normal boring lives.
Life So Good You Don’t Need To Travel
If traveling sucks, but draws us in with excitement and novelty, then we can immediately see that a solution to counterbalance this is to make our lives such that the allure of travel weakens.
Depending on your current lifestyle, this may be easier said than done. But here are some ideas to get you started.
Move To A New Place Rather Than Travel
Moving to an entirely new city or country can give you the novelty and excitement of traditional travel with the added benefit of experiencing the depth and richness of a place at a level impossible to get to in just a few days or weeks.
Moving and living in a place is also much more sustainable as the overall velocity of travel and problems related to over tourism are greatly reduced.
Find Something To Be Passionate About
Is it better to live to work or work to live? How about neither. Instead, how about we make work a small slice of our lives alongside other things we have to be passionate about?
The mundane routine of going to work, watching T.V. , and going out to eat can get rather stale after a while. At which point we’d need a vacation to add some excitement.
But we can just as easily cultivate things that we pour our hearts and minds into that add color to our lives. Once we have these, travel becomes a little less alluring since our attention is elsewhere.
Learn To Love Your Own Life
In a revealing survey, 29% of millennial travelers said they wouldn’t go to a vacation destination if they couldn’t post about it on Instagram.
This tells me that there is a social aspect to travel where some people use it either as a means to signal status or to boost self esteem through validation from others. Or perhaps they are using travel posts to hide deeper insecurities?
As I’ve mentioned, removing the need for approval from others is a great way to be more free. And as an added bonus it appears to be a great way to reduce the allure of travel.
Bonus!!
I originally published this article to the site on April 7th with the opening statement that I’ll be a frontrunner on the topic.
In a very cool stroke of luck I stumbled upon this video by SNL entitled “Canceling A Flight” featuring one of my favorite actors – Jake Gyllenhaal.
So far it has been view by 1.9 people. And based on the comments, it seems that many folks agree that travelling indeed sucks!
I believe changes are on the horizon. In the meantime, I hope Southwest Airlines can survive what this video surely did to its already fledgling reputation.
Am I Telling You To Never Travel?
Absolutely not.
In fact, I think you should do exactly what want with your life as long you are happy with the results.
At the same time, I do think we should consider the impact that travel has on the world around us. And we should also consider if it’s the best use of our precious time and hard earned money.
As for me, I’ll be taking fewer trips in general as time goes on. I feel that my life is already rich enough so jetting to a new land isn’t the most alluring thing – especially given the annoyances.
My suspicion is that most people aren’t ready to recognize how overrated travel is or haven’t done it enough to know. At any rate, I’d love to hear your thoughts on travel, the travel process, and what trips you look forward to on the horizon?
See you in the comments. Bon viaje!