We're All About to Travel
Seeing the world and experiencing other cultures is important, but it comes at a cost.
One day, it occurred to me that it had been many years since the world had been afforded the spectacle of a man adventurous enough to undertake a journey through Europe on foot. After much thought, I decided that I was a person fitted to furnish to mankind this spectacle. So I determined to do it.
Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 1878
If I look at my wife at any given time these days, there's a better-than-average chance that she has one of two websites up on her laptop—Google Flights and/or Airbnb. We've been going back and forth about what to do with a couple of weeks off at the beginning of the summer, and indecision is no longer working in our favor as the time approaches.
Everything within reason, and a few things beyond, are on the table. Few things instill fear in the people of this household like a vacation approaching and the plan being to stay at home (or camping. OK, two things).
The data shows that we aren't alone in this. As summer approaches, if you were to generalize, it wouldn't be that far off the mark to say, "We're all about to travel."
Increasingly, that means international travel.
Last year, a record number of Americans got ready to hit the road for a summer vacation, and this year looks no different. I fully admit to being part of the problem.
I was reading an article that noted the following:
"More than one in five Americans plan on vacationing in a foreign country in the near future, the highest share ever recorded."
Then I realized the article was from last year, and the numbers look even worse this summer.
When I first began exploring the blue economy, I was surprised to learn the importance and sheer scope of the tourism industry. For some countries, the tourism sector can easily account for 20-30% of GDP, and I'm not just talking about small island nations.
Even in the EU, tourism accounts for about 8% of the French economy and 20% or more for Croatia and Greece.
Some other key tourism industry statistics include:
300 million jobs worldwide
$9.5 trillion in economic impact
Both of these factors are expected to grow an additional 50% by 2033
Additionally, when we say tourism, it is more often than not coastal and marine tourism. Estimates of the percentage of all tourism that is coastal tourism range from 50% (Ocean Panel) to 80% (WRI).
Compare it to 2019
Whether you're listening to Royal Caribbean's earnings call or a webinar on the economic recovery of island states, the new baseline for comparison is 2019. Where are we now versus before the pandemic pulled the rug out from under the global tourism industry?
Looking at the chart below, you'll see that 2023 marked the true recovery of the American tourist, and 2024 is already well ahead of the trend. It took a few years to recover, but the growth is explosive.
+Where Americans are traveling in 2024 - ManchesterJournal
Managing the Hoards
The off-season is a thing of the past.
My family had the chance to travel to Europe in February, and every hotel was fully booked. Frazzled, wide-eyed front desk agents talked about how hotels had to work around full occupancy when they usually paused to rest up, do maintenance, and prepare for the summer crush.
Reservations to prominent attractions like the Louvre were impossible to get on the same day. Everything required a bit of planning.
Ahh. Paris in February.
The pandemic gave some overrun tourist destinations a chance to breathe their own air and question whether the economic benefit of tourism is worth the cost. It has gotten to the point that major tourist destinations from Europe to Japan are looking for ways to stem the tide.
Venice, Italy, just launched its fee for daytrippers, furthering its descent into Disneyland status. It's hard to see how that fee will smooth out the hoards of visitors. After all, if you're going to Venice and it fits into a particular day on your itinerary, does it really matter if they charge you an extra 5 euros?
Unlike the "timed access" reservations being used at National Parks in the U.S., Venice does not plan to use the fee system to limit the actual number of visitors.
Other cities will be watching to see how the experiment goes.
But the fee isn't the only step the city has taken. Larger cruise ships were recently banned from docking there, and it seems to be having an effect. After trying to work around the ban by ferrying passengers into the city on smaller boats, Norwegian Cruise Lines announced they are quitting Venice altogether.
Amsterdam launched a "Stay Away" marketing campaign last year, and just this week, a town in Japan has decided to erect a screen to block views of Mt. Fuji so selfie-obsessed tourists will go elsewhere.
Even in the Florida Keys, locals are fed up with cruise ship crowds and are pushing to limit access.
The Great American Consumer
"About 22% of those choosing not to travel this summer cite inflation making travel too expensive as a reason for staying home, according to the poll."
Just a few months ago, most of the Wall Street community was touting that the Fed had orchestrated the impossible - inflation was beaten, recession was avoided, and interest rates would start to come down.
Today, that prediction is out the window. Inflation is sticky, the U.S. economy is still humming along, and the "higher for longer" interest rate scenario is back.
This is partly due to the American consumer. We just keep spending no matter what. Despite the higher prices, as a whole - from our stock portfolios to home values - things are pretty great.
Among discretionary items, consumers expressed in February a higher intention to spend on travel and home (such as on short-term rentals, home improvement, hotel resort stays, and flights) than they did in the fourth quarter of 2023.
+The state of the American consumer - McKinsey
Can Travel to Be Sustainable?
Tourism is a dirty activity.
There are the emissions from the trip, all of the single-use plastics we're likely to touch along the way (despite our best efforts), the contribution to crowds, and the impact on the local environment itself.
Emissions from transport account for about half of tourism-related emissions with another 6% coming from lodging.
If you can travel by EV or train, you've mitigated a large part of your trip's impact. But taking the Eurostar to Europe isn’t available to everyone and the fuels needed to clean up plane flights simply aren't available yet.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the progress that shipping is making in bringing alternative fuels to the market. Aviation isn't even close. (Shipping and aviation account for roughly equal parts of total global emissions.)
This is partly because the options for fuel substitution in aviation are more limited. While shipping, and in turn the cruise industry, has several options available (not all equally good)—from methanol, LNG, ammonia, and biofuels—aviation really only has biofuels.
Biofuels are great at mitigating carbon emissions, the problem is that supply is difficult to scale.
"One of the main challenges to getting SAFs into the skies is expanding the supply. While fats, oils, and greases are the basis of most commercially available SAFs today, the world doesn't eat enough french fries for used cooking oils to meet global jet fuel demand alone. In fact, even with increased collection, waste fats, oils, and greases probably won't provide more than 5% of global jet fuel supply, Pavlenko says.
Some new biofuels, like those made from agricultural residue, municipal solid waste, and hardy crops like switchgrass, are starting to enter the market; a few facilities are under construction or producing jet fuel from these sources worldwide, and the carbon dioxide emission savings they achieve can range from 50% to 90%."
As is always the case with biofuels, one difficulty is that you compete for land with food production.
"SAFs are a solution, but they need to be very properly done," Mirolo says. Otherwise, they risk becoming "a cure that's worse than the disease."
+Everything you need to know about the wild world of alternative jet fuels - MIT
One place that a traveler has some control is waste.
Plastic waste is a large part of the negative impact tourism has on a local community. Once we give up plastic straws and water bottles, you're looking at a hotel that is really working towards removing or minimizing other single-use plastics. And with whatever is left, they need to make sure that it doesn't end up in the ocean.
Since you have no control over a countries waste management systems, the best thing we can do is use less.
The data below shows that refusing water bottles, straws, and plastic bags still ranks among the best things we can do that is actually within our control.
I'll admit, it doesn't feel like much.
Making a Difference on Your Trip
There is a way to make your trip look and feel different.
Increasingly, resorts and local organizations offer guests opportunities to spend some of their time working on projects that benefit the local environment. From beach and mangrove cleanups to tree plantings, setting aside a few hours of your trip to get your hands dirty is possible.
This might sound a little crazy to some, and we often shrug it off as inconsequential. Still, I can say from experience that this can be a positive or even transformational part of your trip.
A few years back, on a trip to Costa Rica, I set up a few opportunities to interact with local organizations and it ended up being one of my most memorable trips.
One of them was a group called Costas Verdes that has been leading reforestation projects in the Guanacaste region since 2009. I spent a hot day planting trees on a beach with their full-time planters, a group of kids from a nearby school, and some other fellow travelers.
Sure, it was just one day, but it felt good to know I spent a little time working on a project in this place I love and return to regularly. I pinned my map where I placed one of my trees and like to go check on it now and again.
Plus, spending the day with some local kids and their teachers was an experience you don't get hanging out at the resort pool.
It might seem small, but it's hard to look at the cumulative result of years of their work and not see the impact. As they say, many hands make light work.
A group in the Florida Keys called the Conch Republic Marine Army is teaming up with local resorts to offer guests the chance to spend a morning cleaning up mangroves.
We run weekly trips for volunteers out into the backcountry every Saturday and with private groups during the week. Each trip gets a great free lunch and everything provided to return home with hundreds if not thousands of pounds in a single trip.
After more than 4,372 volunteers offering their time and passion, as of 9/2023, CRMA has collected 454,163 pounds of debris. That's 227.08 tons! That also includes 2,693,639 feet of trap line removed from the mangroves (that's 510.15 miles) and 91 refrigerators!
Resorts are awakening to the fact that without environmental resources, guests won't come. In fact, the chance to spend some time cleaning mangroves is increasingly a differentiator that would make some people choose one resort over another.
+How World-Class Hotels Are Preserving The Planet's Mangrove Forests - Forbes
The Value of Connection
My least environmentally impactful summer would be staying home and pedaling down the creek on my bike. I know this. But I also stand by the benefits that the world gets by being connected.
We care about people and places that we know and have experience with. Visiting and experiencing other cultures highlights our collective similarities more than our differences—family, community, kids, and putting food on the table.
The irony that the same people who witness bleached coral reefs are often the same people causing the bleaching is not lost on me.
But if we’re hitting the road, I think it’s worth stealing a couple of slogans that are worth keeping in mind:
As urbanists like to point out:
Remember, "You aren't IN traffic; you ARE traffic."
Traveling this summer will require the same mindset. When you are in line in customs or trying to get into a museum, you aren't in line; you are line. Looking around, saying, "Look at all of these tourists!" keep in mind they're looking at you and saying the same thing.
In camping, the "Leave no trace" movement has been pushing responsible interactions with the outdoors for 25 years. As travel increasingly means interacting with our ecosystems, this seems like a good motto for any traveler.
"Few things instil fear in the people of this household like a vacation approaching and the plan being to stay at home." - That feels familiar.